Black Star

CHAPTER 7 — THE WEDGE

“A what?” Boyce shoved the cigar back in his mouth and stared at Maxwell.

“Stealth fighter,” said Maxwell.

“You mean, like the F-117? Low radar signature, low observability?”

“Never mind low,” offered Catfish Bass. “How about zero? If it was another fighter that hosed us, the thing was invisible. Not just to radar, but to the naked eye.” Bass was starting to relax now that he wasn’t going to jail. At least not immediately.

Boyce snorted. “We went through that already. There ain’t no such animal.” He kept staring at Maxwell. “Isn’t that right, Commander Maxwell?”

Maxwell had seen that look before. When Boyce was on to something, he was like a bloodhound sniffing the wind.

“Stealth technology has come a long way since the F-117,” said Maxwell, choosing his words carefully “There might be a new generation.”

“Might be, you say. Would it be anything you might know about?”

While Maxwell hesitated, still weighing how much to say, Ashby, the civilian, spoke up for the first time. “Commander Maxwell is right. There is a new generation of stealth aircraft.” He tossed a manila folder onto the table. “There’s the record, the part that’s not included in his personnel file. When Maxwell was a test pilot, he was assigned for a year to the research facility at Groom Lake in Nevada. The place called Dreamland. He worked on a secret project codenamed Black Star.”

At this, Maxwell cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Mr. Ashby, but that is not—”

“It’s cleared,” said Ashby. He held up the folder, showing the TOP SECRET stencil on the cover. “This matter is now the highest priority. SecDef has given the go-ahead to use all the tools we have to find out what the Chinese are using against us. Your knowledge of Black Star is one of the tools.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Boyce. “You’re telling me that Brick here knows about such an airplane?”

“Not only knows about it. He flew it.”

Maxwell felt Boyce staring at him. Boyce was shaking his head. “There’s no end to the things you haven’t told me.”

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Or anyone else. It was a black project.”

Boyce aimed his cigar like a baton. “Another of your little side jobs when you were a space cadet. Now that we know, maybe this would be a good time for you to enlighten us about this thing called Black Star.”

Maxwell glanced over at Ashby, who gave him a nod. He tilted back in his steel chair and twirled a pen in his hand, remembering. He let his thoughts roll back nearly five years, back to the Nevada high desert. To the place they called Dreamland.

It looked like a wedge. A wedge on wheels.

That had been his first impression, standing there in the fluorescent light of Hangar 501 at Groom Lake. A wedge with an attitude. The Black Star didn’t have the classical, pointy-nosed sleekness of a traditional fighter. Shimmering in the artificial light, the dark-skinned aircraft looked like an apparition. All angles and facets and blurred fixtures.

He had to whistle in amazement. It wasn’t what he expected. Viewed from overhead, the airplane looked like a reversed kite, with an extended triangular frontal area, and a shallower, delta-shaped aft section. Oddest of all, it had no tail, no vertical stabilizer surface. Computer-commanded spoilers in the aft section of each wing gave the jet directional control.

“It’s aerodynamically unstable,” the project director informed him. “The only thing that keeps it from self-destructing in flight is the fly-by-wire flight control system.”

Maxwell was one of three test pilots on the Black Star. One was Joe Hynes, an Air Force lieutenant colonel and veteran test pilot from the Edwards research facility in California. The other was Frank Eaker, a contract civilian who had earned his credentials on the F-117. Maxwell himself had just completed the carrier suitability tests of the new F/A-18 Super Hornet and was already a candidate for a shuttle slot at NASA.

Ten years in development, the Black Star was a secret known only to a dozen senior military and civilian officials and fewer than two hundred contract technicians. The initial proving flights were conducted from Groom Lake’s five-mile-long runway under cover of darkness.

The test program was unlike anything Maxwell had seen. Because of the heavy veil of secrecy, each pilot was responsible for a specific area of testing. They didn’t compare notes, and each was kept uninformed about the others’ experiences.

Maxwell’s job was to explore the air combat envelope — maximum rate turns, high and low speed buffet, accelerated stalls and departures from stable flight, sustained high angle-of-attack maneuvering.

By the end of the test series, he was impressed. The Black Star wasn’t the best fighter he had ever flown — its airframe geometry and inherent instability made it a dog of a fighter — but it didn’t matter. The Black Star traded agility for stealth. This stealth fighter was to air combat what the silent submarine was to naval warfare.

There was much he wasn’t supposed to know about the fighter, but some of it he could deduce. By the radical design, it was obvious that the jet possessed new ways to elude enemy radar and attack targets undetected.

It wasn’t until one dawn flight over Nevada that he observed the Black Star’s most potent attribute. He was at 1,500 feet, flying down the length of Groom Lake’s long runway, about to turn downwind and land. In the pale light, he had glimpsed the shape of the second test aircraft — Eaker’s Black Star — lift from the runway and point its nose into the sky.

Maxwell rolled his jet into a turn, keeping his eye on Eaker’s jet. Never before had he actually seen another Black Star in flight. As he brought his own jet abeam Eaker’s, a thousand feet above him, it happened.

The Black Star disappeared.

Maxwell blinked, thinking he had lost it momentarily in the gloom of the Nevada sky. He peered again. Nothing. Eaker and the number two Black Star had vanished.

The truth dawned on him. He understood why the Black Star was more deadly than the most radar-elusive fighter.

It was invisible.

When Maxwell finished, Boyce asked, “How does it work?”

Maxwell shook his head. “I don’t know exactly. They didn’t tell us much about that. My understanding was that the composite skin had a plasma surface. An ionized gas with an electrical charge.”

“Something they can turn on and off?”

“Probably. Now you see it, now you don’t. That’s why I could see Eaker as he took off. When he activated the skin masking, he became invisible.”

Boyce nodded. “Like whatever it was that shot down Dynasty One.”

“Like whatever it was that shot me down,” said Catfish Bass. “And my wingman.”

“Okay,” said Boyce. “If such a thing exists, all it means is that we have it, not them. Somebody explain how a country like China, where they haven’t figured out flush toilets, could have super stealth technology.”

“Simple,” said Ashby. “The same way they have cruise missiles and super computers.”

“Which is?”

“They buy it. Or steal it.”

Boyce made a face. “Or some elected asshole gives it to them.”

“Either way. It’s quicker and cheaper than developing it themselves.”

“What about the Russians?” Maxwell said. “They’ve been working on their own stealth jets for years. Would they pass it to China?”

“Maybe in the old days, but probably not now,” said Ashby. “But if so, we’ve got ways of making Ivan very sorry he did it. The fact is, Russia is just as worried about China as we are. It’s pretty unlikely they would share their most valuable secrets.”

“In the meantime,” said Catfish Bass, “their invisible stealth jet is chewing up the Taiwanese Air Force. My Taiwanese F-16 pilots will get picked off like flies.”

“It’s not our fight,” said Boyce. He held up a computer print-out. “These are the Rules of Engagement. What they say, in essence, is that U.S. forces stay out of it. The Reagan Strike Group is supposed to keep a watchful presence out here to remind the ChiComs that we’re friends of Taiwan. Fire only if fired upon, and avoid confrontations with the PLA air force. Washington thinks Taiwan can take care of itself if we just keep them armed.”

“That was before Black Star,” said Bass. “Now they’re hosed.”

Boyce didn’t answer. A silence fell over the table. Boyce seemed to lapse into a trance. For a while he played with his cigar, rolling it around the table, while his eyes focused on some faraway object.

Finally, he looked up at the group. “I’ve got an idea.”

It took six hours.

First he had to run it by the Strike Group Commander, Admiral Hightree, who gave it his own cautious endorsement. From the Reagan’s comm center, the proposal flew at the speed of light, via satellite, to CincPac in Hawaii, then up the ladder to CNO, the Joint Chiefs, then the White House where it underwent the scrutiny of the National Security Council.

The tasking order came back the same route, only slightly watered down from Boyce’s original plan.

“Here it is,” he said, holding the document that Admiral Hightree had just given him in the flag intel compartment. “The go ahead for the great Chinese stealth sucker play.”

Maxwell noticed Hightree giving Boyce a curious stare. Hightree was new to the Reagan Strike Group, having taken command only a month ago. The admiral had not yet been exposed to CAG Boyce when he was concocting one of his high risk operations.

“What are the rules?” Maxwell asked. “I know they’re not giving us carte blanche.”

“Not bad, considering the old ladies on the National Security Council,” said Boyce. He perused the tasking order for a moment. “No overflight of Chinese territorial waters, it says. Can’t argue with that. No overtly hostile actions toward PLA aircraft. That’s okay too, as long as we maintain a CAP between the strike group and the mainland. Here’s the clincher. Use of the Chameleon decoy is authorized, but it mustn’t overfly Chinese territory.”

“Chameleon” was the working name of the new UAV-17, a single-engine, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft equipped with a configurable radar and IR signature. Using its own electronic emulation equipment, Chameleon could present itself on enemy radars and infra-red sensors as a high altitude bomber, fast-moving fighter, or a surveillance aircraft.

“Chameleon is an expensive piece of hardware,” said Hightree. “Before I throw one of these away, you’d better tell me what you have in mind for it.”

“What kind of intruder would get the Chinese most agitated?” said Boyce. “What would be the most likely thing to draw out the stealth jet?”

Hightree was giving Boyce the curious stare again. “Knock off the quiz game, Red. Just tell us.”

“EA-6B Prowler.” Boyce’s voice was growing more intense as he warmed to his subject. The Prowler was a carrier-based, four-crewmember jet with communications jamming, eavesdropping, and radar suppression capability. “The ChiComs are so goddamn paranoid, they’ll assume the Prowler is either directing an attack or stealing all their secrets.”

“Can the decoy really do that?” asked Maxwell. “Emulate a Prowler?”

“The ECM geeks tell me it can emulate a seagull shitting on a beach ball.”

Hightree made a face. “That’s good enough, I guess.” He rose and checked his watch. “You and Group Ops come up with an air plan by 1300. Run it by Captain Stickney, then send it to me. If it looks doable, I’ll sign off on it.”

When Hightree closed the door behind him, Boyce and Maxwell were alone in the compartment. Boyce settled himself back into the chair and pulled out a fresh cigar. He had already figured out that Hightree detested cigars. “Well, here we go again.”

Maxwell recognized the tone in Boyce’s voice. “We?”

“I need a leader for the fighters.”

“You’ve got twenty qualified strike leaders in the air wing.”

“Only one of them has ever seen the Black Star.”

Maxwell nodded. He should have expected it. “Yes, sir. What am I supposed to do if I encounter the thing?”

“You want the official order or the off-the-record version?”

“Both, please.”

“If we succeed in drawing it out, we will use all our assets to get a make on it. We’ll have every tool in our bag — IR, visual, radar, satellite imaging — to collect data and confirm the thing exists. That’s the end of your mission, and Defense Intel takes it from there.”

“Those are my official orders. What am I really supposed to do?”

Boyce pulled out his ancient Zippo and put a flame to his cigar. He took his time, squinting through the cloud of gray smoke, getting an ember going.

Finally he peered over at Maxwell. “You’re supposed to kill the sonofabitch.”