Target Lock

Curtin Royal Australian Air Force Base The Kimberley, Northwestern Australia 0723 Hours, Zone Time: August 2, 2008

In the lexicon of the Australian military, it was called a “bare base.” That is, it had no assigned squadrons, no garrison, no base section, no guards. It was only a naked, sun-scalded strip of concrete and a scattering of empty buildings between the shimmering waters of King Sound and the distant rusty-gold peaks of the King Leopold range. Its sole advantage over the surrounding thorn scrub pans being that airplanes, large and fast ones, could take off and land and be staged from it.

Curtin’s mission was simply to he there on this, Australia’s loneliest coast. Just in case. Just so there might be a place to stand should a threat again arise from beyond the seas.

This morning began much as many others had, with the parching winds swirling across the empty parking aprons and taxiways and the heat shimmer starting its day’s dance over the runway. A small herd of kangaroos clustered around one of the capped wellheads near the main compound, jostling with one another to lick at the precious drops of water leaking from a defective seal.

Abruptly, the ’roos looked up as a thudding drone rolled across the desert. Seconds later they broke into a mad scramble for the brush as Curtin received its first incoming flight.

An Australian army CH-470 Chinook helicopter lumbered slowly down the flight line, its big twin rotors kicking up a small tornado of sand as it settled onto its undercarriage trucks beside the empty control tower.

Men and women disembarked, almost two score of them, clad in the field fatigues of both the Australian and United States air forces. Lugging a heavy burden of personal gear, toolboxes, and equipment cases, they trudged down the tail ramp of the grounded helicopter.

Emptied, the Chinook lifted into the sky again, leaving its former passengers to their tasks.

Some of the Australians produced massive key rings and scattered toward the sealed and deserted buildings along the flightline. U.S. communications personnel established a satellite phone link to the outside world and climbed the control tower carrying backpack SINCGARS radios with them. Other airmen began the long walk in the beating sun along the runways, searching for and clearing away foreign objects from the concrete. There was no time to waste. More traffic was inbound, a lot of it.

The first USAF C-130J entered the pattern an hour later. After circling once to survey the approaches to the semicontrolled field, it gingerly settled out of the sky to land. Braking hard and with its quadruple turbo props reversing, the transport came to a halt at the airfield centerline. Its tailgate opened and swiftly it gave birth to a mobile airfield radar truck, a dozen more ground personnel and a humvee towing a power unit.

With its payload disembarked, the C-130 taxied back to the end of the runway for takeoff. One of its sisters was already circling impatiently, demanding a clear field.

All through the day a steady stream of C-130s and C-17s flowed in, and with each aircraft, Curtin Field came a little more alive. Generator sets snored, pumping electricity into the reactivated power grid. Water lines spat rust and hissed before gushing clean. Windows and doors were slammed open, allowing the wind off the sound to blow the hot staleness from the living quarters.

Portable landing lights were deployed along the runways, even as aircraft touched down. Sitting in their air-conditioned vans, GCA controllers worked traffic as casually as might have been done at LAX. A growing fleet of ground vehicles trundled along the base roadways: humvee’s, pickups, tankers, fire and rescue trucks.

A field kitchen served hot A rations. Field desks were carried into empty offices. Sleeping bags were unrolled on barracks floors.

Not all of the aircraft that arrived departed again. An iron-ball-black MC-130J Combat Talon transport from the U.S. Air Force’s First Special Operations Wing taxied over to its reserved slot on the parking apron and shut down, disgorging its own ground crew and the support equipment and parts inventory it would need for a protracted stay.

The Air Commando Combat Talon was a relation to the standard C-130 Hercules transports flying into Curtin, but at best a cousin. Stealthed and equipped with an extensive, cutting-edge array of sensors and countermeasures systems, the Talon was intended to go into places where conventional cargo aircraft couldn’t survive, and to get out again.

On another stretch of apron, preparations were made to receive a very different class of airplane. The small fleet of white vans and trailers belonging to the mission control and the launch-and-recovery elements deployed with practiced speed. Multiple radio masts extended hydraulically, and satellite dishes elevated and tracked across the sky, sensing for their incoming charges.

The justification for it all arrived just as the sun touched the western horizon, the red light flaming off of its composite skin. In silhouette, it was rather like an exceptionally futuristic sailplane, with the span of its narrow straight wings being twice the length of the stumpy fuselage. A sharply angled V tail was set aft and a pronounced hump atop the fuselage contained its Rolls-Royce/Allison turbofan engine, now throttled back to a bare whisper of power.

Smoothly it ghosted in over the main runway, landing gear extending from its belly. There was a puff of smoke as tires touched tarmac and it was down, completing its eleven-thousand-mile deployment flight from its base on the West Coast of the United States.

As it taxied toward its parking stand, an observer might also note a strong similarity with the legendary U-2/TR-1 family of reconnaissance aircraft.

There was one decided difference: The Global Hawk UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) didn’t have a cockpit. One was not required. The “pilot” who had landed it sat in a virtual-reality cockpit within one of the mission control vans.

With the first bird safe on the ground and powered down, the UAV systems operator flipped up the heavy display visor of his VR helmet and paused to take a gulp from a can of lukewarm Diet Pepsi balanced on his console top. Keying the intercom that linked him with the gang over in the cruise monitoring trailer, he advised them he was ready to assume link with the second of the four inbound UAVs, and could they please hurry it up before the lasagna was gone over at the chow line?

As night fell over Curtin, the transformation was complete. Bustling activity had replaced abandonment. Lights blazed within its hangars and buildings. Come the next dawn the first Global Hawk would sortie northward into the skies over Indonesia. The base had a mission and meaning again

In the thorn scrub beyond the base perimeters, the ’roos thirstily watched the activity and dimly wondered how they would reach the wellhead.