The Ghost of Flight 666

PROLOGUE: Windows

Air Force test pilot Jeremiah Slade hated his given name. Most people just called him Slade, but not Jay or Jerry, and never Jeremiah. Rather like the Johnny Cash ballad, Slade grew up not only hating the name but developing a cold, impenetrable exterior to deal with the ridicule.

That armor never left him.

Today was no different. As Slade left his squadron operations building at Edwards Air Force Base to conduct a high level test mission, his test engineer, a DARPA guy who was good but chatty, needled him. “Lots of Congressmen and Senators watching today’s test flight Jerry — you nervous?”

Slade didn’t answer as they stepped out of the air conditioned building into the blast furnace heat of the flight line. The tarmac shimmered. The smell of jet fuel, exhaust and asphalt was stifling. Neither the heat nor the test engineer appeared to bother Slade. Topping six feet, at an athletic two hundred and ten pounds, Slade walked with an easy, almost panther-like stride. As a rule he was serious. His most demonstrative action was to brush back the lone forelock of his dark hair from his lean, gunfighter face with its piercing eyes.

“Jeez, you really are touchy about your name aren’t you?”

No answer. Slade saw no reason to waste words on the obvious.

“You do know how important this mission is don’t you — Slade?” the engineer asked, now getting nervous. His butt was on the line as well. “Those guys from D.C. will be listening to every word, watching everything via datalink. This is as big as it gets!”

Slade finally answered enigmatically, “Yeah, it ranks right up there.”

They climbed into a specially modified F-15E Eagle and performed their preflight, including a lengthy routine on the small box connected to a belly pod codenamed “Magic.” Everything checked. They started engines, taxied out, and then Slade shoved the throttles up for takeoff. The Eagle accelerated quickly, pushing them back in their ejection seats. The runway markings sped by, and Slade eased the stick back. It didn’t take much, the Eagle was sensitive. Half a mile down the runway the Eagle effortlessly climbed into the sky.

The fifty-eight thousand pounds of thrust generated by the engines dominated the cockpit, permeating Slade’s flesh, shaking his bones — he loved that, but he would never admit it. The twenty-five ton aircraft accelerated into the hazy blue sky. As the hangers of the flight line disappeared beneath the canopy rail, the test engineer announced, “Approaching the first test point Jay.”

No answer.

He cursed and repeated the declaration. “First test point — Slade!”

“Checks,” he replied to the unnecessary announcement. “Test point one, three thousand feet; two hundred fifty knots; clean configuration — mark — clear for magic!”

“Magic — on! ALQ nine-seven-two mode alpha engaged,” the test engineer replied, adding unofficially, in a bad Scottish brogue, “Cloaking device engaged Cap’n, all systems nominal!”

“Stick to the script,” Slade reminded the engineer.

“Approaching test point two!” the engineer announced.

“Test point — hold on,” Slade started to say, but he stopped. As the altimeter swept through ten thousand feet the Eagle began to shudder, not violently but conspicuously. Instinctively, Slade backed off the throttle, slowing down. The buffeting stopped.

“What’s up; what was that?” the engineer asked with concern.

“I don’t know, but it felt like it was coming from the tail,” Slade told him, stabilizing the aircraft at 240 knots. He lightened his grip on the stick, feeling for any further vibration — nothing. “We’ll approach the test point again — stand by.” He accelerated slowly, smoothly, but once again at 250 knots the aircraft began to shudder. Slade felt it in the elevators via the stick. The rudder pedals chattered, transmitting the buffet on the rudder into his boots.

“Turn the Magic off!”

“That’s not in the test script!” the engineer complained.

“Turn it off!”

“Magic off!”

The buffeting continued.

“That’s it,” he said sharply, easing the throttles back. The buffeting stopped. Slade allowed the speed to bleed off, levelling the jet. “We’re scrubbing the mission and returning to base. Call operations and get a chase ship up here to look us over.”

“You sure Slade?” the back-seater said. “This is as high priority as a test gets!”

“The test won’t matter if we’re a pile of smoking metal in the desert,” he replied, leaving no room for argument.

“You got that from a bit of buffet? I think it’s just the big gyro in the pod,” the engineer theorized, meaning the heavy rotating electromagnetic transmitter mounted on the belly. “We knew there might be turbulence problems caused by the rotation. It’s just the pod deforming in the windstream. Don’t worry, it’s stressed up to nine g’s; the pod’s not going to come off.”

“It’s not the pod; it’s in the tail not the belly,” Slade reiterated. “Let operations know that we’re doing a controllability check and bringing it in slow; get that chase ship. I’ll declare an emergency with Joshua Control.”

“Are you sure?”

“Get on the horn with Ops,” Slade told him emphatically.

“All right, but I’m not taking the fall for this! The general brought half of Washington out here on a weekend to see this mission! He’s not going to be happy!”

“The general isn’t in charge up here — I am!” Slade replied coldly.

As it turned out, the engineer was right. The general was not happy at all. He was so steamed, that he marched out of the test control center and left the dressing down of Slade to the Test Wing Commander Colonel McFarland.

McFarland scowled at Slade with knit brows and a clenched jaw, reminding the junior officer, “Captain Slade, you did a Functional Check Flight on this aircraft three days ago — right — no problems?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well there better be a problem now! The old man is hot!”

Maintenance took the aircraft and went over it, finding — nothing. Slade told them to check again. Again they found nothing. Colonel McFarland was irate.

“Maintenance can’t find anything wrong with the aircraft. Captain, as the chief test pilot of this program you’ve grounded the aircraft; by regulation my hands are tied. Only you can clear it to fly again. I suggest you take it back up and do another check profile.”

“Sir, with all due respects, I think this is a structural problem in the tail. That’s where the buffet came from.”

“Maintenance buys the test engineers story about the pod being the problem,” the Wing King replied impatiently.

“Sir, I’ll talk with maintenance; we’ll find out what’s wrong,” Slade replied.

“Make it fast captain, Washington wants these tests done and they want them done now! We have operational missions waiting to go.” The colonel hung up.

Slade talked to maintenance. They went through the aircraft with a fine toothed comb. The next morning they got back to him. “Sir, we checked the gear doors, the fairings, balance bays, cables, the pod, you name it. Everything checked out.”

“What did you check in the tail?”

“Both stabilizers are at the same trim setting, elevators move fine, hydraulics are within limits — we’re stuck.”

He hung up, but before Slade could second guess himself the phone rang. It was General Green. He was blunt. “Captain Slade, I don’t think I need to tell you how important that jet is. We need to know whether this system is going to work before we commit reconnaissance aircraft to high risk areas — do you understand?”

“Yes sir, and that’s part of my reasoning for grounding the aircraft,” Slade said. “If the problem is structural there’s a chance of losing the empennage. We’re risking a unique testbed. It took six months to outfit this Eagle. We can’t afford a mishap sir.”

“Release the aircraft to another test crew,” the general demanded.

“With all due respect, I can’t do that sir,” Slade replied as tactfully as he could muster. “If I’m right and the failure occurs during takeoff no one gets out and we lose the asset.”

“That’s not what maintenance says. That’s not good enough captain. I need that jet!”

“Sir, we’ll get it back to you ASAP,” Slade replied, but the line was already dead.

The next few days grew increasingly bad. Everyone distanced themselves from Slade. His test engineer began whispering, “I knew it was only the pod, but Slade knows best! He told the general to shove it; this was his program not the general’s!”

Slade knew he had to shake the tree. He called Tech Sergeant Roscoe Chapman. The sergeant worked on Eagles since their initial flight testing and was Slade’s crew chief for three years before getting a coveted transfer across the base to NASA’s flight test center. No one knew the airplane better.

“Sergeant, I have an Eagle, number 0183, you know the one; it’s the Dreamland bird,” he said, going on to explain what happened on the mission. “I know you’re busy, but I need to another pair of eyes on this. Can you come down and look at it — now — it’s in the middle of the program and we have a timeline to keep?”

“No problem captain, I’d still be rotting in that Costa Rican jail if you hadn’t sweet talked the Secretary of Transportation into letting me out!” he laughed. “I’m on my way!”

Chapman checked in with Slade on the way to the maintenance hangar, looking through his own personal log of the aircraft; Roscoe kept meticulous records for every aircraft he worked on. “I oversaw the current modifications on 0183 before I came over to NASA. This bird was the first production E model, December of 1986, she’s got lots of miles on her.”

“What’s your gut feeling?”

“The bird’s thirty years old captain. Those elevator cables stretch after years of high G forces; it doesn’t take much. If there’s something wrong I’ll find it.” He began to walk out, but then he stopped and turned. “Captain, what if I don’t find anything?”

“Then I take her up again,” Slade shrugged. “If you say the aircraft is sound, sergeant, that’s good enough for me.” Chapman nodded and got to work.

Two hours later Sergeant Chapman called Slade to the jet. Slade arrived with his squadron commander Lt. Colonel Wilkins and found Colonel McFarland and General Green there as well. They were not in a good mood. Apparently Sergeant Chapman would not report to them until Captain Slade was there.

Slade saluted.

They refused to salute back.

Instead, the general barked, “Sergeant what do you have to say? No excuses. I want to know exactly why I had to send two dozen of the most powerful people in Washington back to the capital with nothing — nothing!”

“Yes sir, but begging your pardon sir, I think I better show you.” Chapman led them to the left rear stabilizer. There was a ladder there. Sergeant Chapman pointed to the fin.

“Captain Slade, sir, would you push up on the leading edge of the stabilizer.” Slade climbed the ladder under the withering scrutiny of his commanding officers. He knew what he expected to find; the stabilizer must be loose. Even a slight wiggle in the fin at high speeds would cause significant buffet that would inevitably shake the fin apart.

Slade was wrong — dead wrong.

Obediently he pushed up on the leading edge of the stabilizer. It wasn’t supposed to budge, but it moved and it didn’t stop moving. There was a gasp from the observers. Slade pushed until the left horizontal fin was straight up and down; however, the right fin was still in its horizontal position; that wasn’t the way it was supposed to look.

“Holy shit! What the Hell happened?” General Green demanded.

Sergeant Chapman pointed to the stabilizer and replied, “Sir, the horizontal stabilizer is held on the torque tube by a bolt two inches in diameter. The bolt is missing. It had worn through the torque tube until the head could fit through mounting bracket and then it departed the aircraft. That’s when Captain Slade felt the buffet.”

“You mean to tell me there was nothing holding the stabilizer on the aircraft?” the colonel exclaimed, turning white.

“Nothing sir,” the sergeant said, shaking his head. “There’s no reason on God’s green Earth the fin should still be on the airplane; there’s literally nothing holding it on! I don’t know how Captain Slade flew the jet and I don’t know how he landed it. All I know is that if this jet tried to takeoff like this the stabilizer would have come off. It would have killed everyone on board. They wouldn’t have known what hit them.”

The commanders strode off without a word. Slade’s squadron commander looked after them, cursing, but then he came up to Slade. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.”

Wilkins stomped off. Slade went and offered his hand to Sergeant Chapman.

“You saved my ass.”

“No need to thank me sir, I’m just glad you called. These new techs have no common sense. They don’t know how an airplane flies. They checked the rigging, the sensors and the position indicators — everything the tech order told them to — everything was right on. But they never actually touched the tail. I’m glad to help straighten things out.” Then he looked at Slade strangely, and hesitantly said, “You know there’s no way you should have been able to land that jet.”

“I know. Someone was looking out for me,” Slade admitted.

“I never knew if you believed in God or not sir.”

“Oh I always believed in Him, Roscoe,” Slade said, using the sergeant’s first name for the first time. “I just didn’t know until now that He believed in me.”

Three months later, after a successful conclusion to the test program, the fallout kicked in the door to Slade’s life.

Lt. Colonel Wilkins called Slade into his office. He entered and saluted. The commander pointed to his chair, and said, “Slade, I put you in for a commendation medal for saving the aircraft and crew of the test flight.”

“Sir I appreciate that, but I was just doing my job.”

“That’s the story of your career isn’t it?” the colonel said mysteriously. He reached into his desk and took out a blue leather folder and handed it to Slade. “This is the medal and the commendation; everything went through fine.” He laughed humorlessly, adding, “That weasel of a test engineer put in for a commendation himself and got it. If you’d listened to him you’d both be dead!”

Slade took it without any show of emotion. The colonel shook his head, but it was the timbre of his voice that caught the captain’s attention. Slade stiffened.

“Damn it captain, you don’t get it do you?” the colonel snapped, catching Slade completely off guard. “I’ve got thirty pilots out there. You’re the best of them, but why are you still here instead of in the astronaut program? I’ll tell you why: self-promotion!

“You should have rung your own bell like the DARPA engineer did; you would have been right to do so! Who the Hell knows you did a great job unless you tell them? I’ll give you an example: one of my line pilots, Captain Barr, has half the time you have and half the credentials — damn it, she scraped the tail off a C-17, a Class A mishap — but she’s going to the astronaut program, not you. You thought doing your job exceptionally well should be enough. It’s not. You flew under the radar in RF-4’s during Desert Storm; you’re still doing it! Wake up!”

The colonel got up and pointed to the mandatory row of photos on his office wall. It descended from the President of the United States all the way down to General Green and Colonel McFarland. “Because you’re stubborn and you’re good, General Green will get his second star and Colonel McFarland will get his first. If you’d knuckled under to their pressure we’d have had a mishap. The investigation would have stopped the program for a year. The command would have cleaned house — the general, the colonel — even me. We owe you our careers and this is how we repay you.”

“I don’t understand sir,” Slade replied.

The commander slid a file over to Slade.

“I’m sorry Jeremiah, they want you out. You embarrassed them by doing your job to perfection. Your people got promoted, but you got passed over for major. You’ve got six months. I’m sorry.”

Slade got up with his commendation medal and his walking papers in hand. He saluted smartly. The colonel stood and saluted, but said, “Jeremiah, it’s been an honor serving with you. Let me give you one last piece of advice: take advantage of opportunities when they’re offered. You didn’t do that in the Air Force. If you had, I’d be saluting you instead of the other way around. Even if it’s not what you think you want, take the opportunity and run with it. When a door closes a window always opens — remember that.”

“Yes sir.”

Jeremiah Slade walked out of the operations building a broken man. He’d followed the rules, done his job and done it well. This is what he got for it? “I’m done. Twelve years down the tubes. What the Hell do I do now?” He felt the physical weight of bills piling on his head.

Slade went to the Officer’s Club and took a seat at the bar, wondering just how he was going to deal with this sudden change of events. He had six months to solve the problem, then the money stopped. What could he do? Slade was a pilot, but he loathed the idea of the airlines. It wasn’t an option anyway — the major airlines were all in bankruptcy. With that reminder he got out his wallet.

With a bitter laugh, Slade mocked himself. “Ten days to payday and I haven’t got enough for a beer!”

The bartender came over. Humiliated, Slade held up his hand. “Sorry, I can’t stay.”

A voice from behind him said, “Two of whatever the captain is drinking — on me.”

“Yes sir,” the bartender said, looking expectantly at Slade.

Slade turned around to see a man in a suit with a government haircut holding a briefcase. He shrugged and motioned to the seat next to him, answering, “Michelob.”

The man sat down. “You move fast Captain Slade. I didn’t even have a chance to catch you at the squadron before you bugged out.”

“I didn’t have much incentive to stay.”

“That’s why I’m here,” the man said with a shadow of a smile. He held out a hand. “I’m Joe Wilson. I’m an old friend of Lt. Colonel Wilkins. He called me and told me about your situation — the whole story — I’m sorry. The service hates to lose good men.”

“They have a funny way of showing it,” Slade replied suspiciously, but he shook the man’s hand. Lt. Colonel Wilkins last bit of advice rang in his head.

Wilson shrugged. “The Air Force’s loss is the CIA’s gain. That’s who I work for.”

“The CIA? Why would you be interested in me?” Slade said as the bartender set down two bottles. “I’m a pilot. I don’t have any training in whatever it is you guys do.”

“We always need pilots — good ones — we challenge our people,” Wilson said, tipping back the Michelob. He looked at Slade with a penetrating all-knowing expression. “You’re more than just a pilot though Slade. You’re an expert marksman; you earned your black belt; you earned a Master’s degree and your loyalty factor is off the charts. You’re what we call a suitable candidate.”

He paused and took another swig of his beer. Turning to look at the soon to be ex-Air Force officer, the CIA recruiter put the question to Slade. “What if I were to tell you that your service to your country didn’t have to end here?”

“I’m still coming to grips with my career spiraling down in flames,” Slade said with a sigh. “Do you need an answer right now?”

“Let me put it to you in a practical sense Captain Slade,” Wilson said firmly. “Windows only stay open for so long. We want, no, we demand dedicated individuals. The reasons are obvious. We have needs, but so do you. Your — lifestyle — isn’t cheap Captain Slade. Your salary barely covers expenses. What’s going to happen in a few years? Well, by my reckoning, considering your responsibility oriented character and your special needs, well your expenses are going through the roof.”

“You know a lot about me,” Slade admitted.

“Our file on you is fairly comprehensive.”

“You’re right,” Jeremiah sighed, but then he glanced at Wilson and his eyes narrowed. “Money isn’t much of a reason for loyalty. Wouldn’t that make me even more of a risk?”

“If that were all there is to it we wouldn’t be talking,” Wilson replied dryly. “You’re the kind of guy who takes pride in serving your country. You demand responsibility; hence your money problems. You also need the adrenaline rush.”

“You know about that do you?”

The man nodded. “On one of your missions over Bagdad you flew over an Iraqi helicopter at Mach 1.2. The report said you overflew him by less than twenty feet.”

“Ten — my wake turbulence caused him to depart controlled flight,” Slade smiled thinly. “I got credited with a kill; the only one by a Recce pilot that I know of.”

“You have courage with a splash of nasty thrown in for good measure,” the agent said.

“I was frustrated because I was flying an unarmed Recce bird in the middle of a shooting war,” Slade sighed.

“Yet you still did your job,” the agent smiled, swigging his beer but not taking his eyes off Slade. “We can use men like you.” His expression turned deadly serious. “Understand me Slade, this isn’t James Bond and Specter. We’re in the middle of a war on terror. These people are not as sophisticated as your Hollywood villains, but they are crueler than you can ever imagine. Your job will take you into hostile territory.”

Slade shrugged and said, “As long as I have a good life insurance policy, we’re set.”

“May I take that for a yes?” the agent smiled, holding out his half empty bottle toward Slade.

Slade thought about it. “To windows,” he muttered, and then he reached over and clinked the bottom of his bottle with Wilson. The deal was done.