The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TWENTY-THREE

With a wealth of landing sites to choose from, Ben Ullmer suggested Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Naval surveillance aircraft carried highly sophisticated hardware, and in answer to a wild surmise by Ullmer, the NSA computers had kicked out a surprising answer. Yes, NAS Jacksonville had not one but three special X-Band radars gathering dust in a hangar.

Dar Weston approved Jacksonville because they could duck newsmen, who lacked the required clearances. The story had hit evening papers and now, as the Learjet taxied away in gathering darkness, Dar wanted to use a scrambler to Terry Unruh. Instead, he stood in the hangar, loosening his tie and trying to understand the impenetrable thicket of terms as Ullmer swapped jargon with a spiffy naval officer who seemed too young for his oak leaves.

When the officer turned away to confer with three ratings, all electronics technicians, Dar caught Ullmer’s eye. “Ben, if Black Stealth One is invisible to radar, what’s the point in putting these sets in naval aircraft?”

Ullmer blinked, looked as if he were about to explode, then shook his head. “I keep forgetting you’re a—uhm. Okay: aircraft use a certain band of frequencies to avoid collisions and so on. We call it ‘C’ Band; it ignores clouds and birds and locust swarms and a shitpot of other stuff that clutters your scope. I mean, if C Band reflected everything you’d have mostly clutter all over your video screen. With me so far?”

Another time, Dar would have given an icy response to Ullmer’s blatantly patronizing tone. But Ben Ullmer was under stress too, Dar told himself, and it had been Ullmer who’d had the humanity to balk at shooting down an airplane with a hostage in it—even before he knew who that hostage was. “Go ahead,” Dar said calmly.

“But there’s an ‘X’ Band of radar too,” Ullmer went on, darting glances toward the men who were trundling test equipment out. “X Band sees everything, Weston; it’ll see the hellbug. It’ll also see everything else, including dust and clear air turbulence, and all of it gets painted on the scope so you have to guess what’s what by the way it acts. Result is clutter like you wouldn’t believe. But if you’re already within a mile or two of something like the hellbug, especially in good weather, you might pick it up on X Band and then maybe you could get an eyeball on it. You narrow the X-Band aperture and boost its transmission power, and ignore everything that isn’t acting like an airplane. It’ll see the airchine, all right; you just have to recognize what you see.” His faint smile held less worry and more confidence than Dar had seen that day. “Some scope men can do it. It’s an art.”

Sheppard, back at Elmira, had endorsed the X-Band idea. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind, now, that Kyle Corbett had flown at medium altitude through a swarm of military aircraft over Georgia without being spotted by anything but an unarmed Cessna. “When science fails,” Dar said, “I suppose we turn to art.” Then, seeing the officer’s return, he said quickly, “What’s the X-Band stuff doing here?”

The young officer, Hinshaw, heard the question. “We have gulls, sir. Googols of gulls. We’ve retrieved naval aircraft from the bay and found the jet intakes packed half full of gull bodies. So we had to study their behavior. We, uh,” he seemed faintly embarrassed now. “We did some of those studies in P2V’s in nice clear weather using X Band for the, uh, chase. Eglin and Pensacola have the same problem, but we’ve got the P2V’s. Gulls are protected animals but can we help it if they fail to avoid a big propeller?”

Ben Ullmer nodded. “Gulls won’t hurt those old Lockheed prop jobs much, Weston. But a Neptune could pretty much wipe out a few thousand gulls. Civilians call the P2V a Neptune.”

“Got it,” said Dar, “but what in God’s name is a googol?”

“Ten to the hundredth power, sir,” said Hinshaw. “It just means ‘a lot.’ I was exaggerating, sir.” He spoke like a contrite college prankster.

It broke the tension for Dar, who clapped the young electronics expert on the back gently and managed a smile. “You’re entitled; you’re part of the solution, not the problem, and you’re responding wonderfully. I suppose the next question is, will there be room in a Neptune for us?”

“Room for ten men and a googolplex of sandwiches,” Hinshaw replied, his eyes sparkling. “A whole lot.”

Ullmer: “They as loud as ever? I used to be Lockheed myself.”

” ‘Fraid so, but there’s a head onboard, too. It’s not too bad when a man can take a leak in comfort,” Hinshaw replied. “Without jet pods on the wings a P2V will loiter for, I don’t know, at least twelve hours. The flight crews will know, sir.”

A deep rumble filled the hangar, and Dar saw the massive doors trundling aside. Slowly approaching the hangar from the concrete ramp was a tiny tractorlike vehicle, towing a dull blue behemoth from the past Dar saw the twin engines with their tremendous propellers, remembered the mind-numbing drone of the wartime transport that had dropped him into Greece. It did not seem possible that they would be chasing down the most sophisticated aircraft on earth in these vintage brutes.

Ullmer was speaking to young Hinshaw again, not whispering but clearly not intending his words to carry.

“That’s not my field either,” said Hinshaw. “The P2V has a little bomb bay of sorts for antisub duty. Whether you could fit a pod of fifties on, I don’t know. Some blue-suiters from Eglin are already waiting for you, sir.”

As Dar listened, his depression returned. Eglin Air Force Base and its blue-clad weapon wizards could provide a stunning array of armaments, including some that were still under test at Eglin. Dar found himself hoping that the nastier Air Force stuff could not be quickly adapted to a naval aircraft.

Hinshaw turned toward his primary job and a dozen technicians after promising that the two operating X-Band sets would be installed in P2V’s before dawn. The third set was an enigma, missing parts that might or might not be found.

Ben Ullmer’s face was set in a way that would not reveal much. “We’ve got to see the weapons people. I hate it as much as you do, but both sightings had Corbett heading south.” The second sighting, by an off-duty National Parks ranger twenty miles from Waycross, Georgia, had been a fluke. The ranger knew something about wildlife, and had called in an official query as to the possibility of a California condor loose near the Okefenokee. NSA listening devices had isolated his call; they were that good. Unruh, claiming to be a model airplane builder, had interviewed the ranger by telephone and realized what the man had seen without alerting him to its significance. Unruh was that good, too.

With every datum pointing to a southerly course by Black Stealth One, Bill Sheppard would be paying close attention to Dar’s decisions. “You’re a decent man, Ben,” Dar said. “We’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”

A tinny beep began to sound rhythmically at Ullmer’s side. He raised his hand to reveal a second wristwatch, a modern type with all the latest functions. Ben punched a button, stopping the noise. “Fucking pills,” he swore, and fumbled in his pockets as they began to walk to the offices at one side of the hangar.

He needs a high-tech watch, but he still wears that old windup thing too, thought Dar. I guess a man can be high-tech and old-fashioned as well Maybe you can’t hang on to both sets of values without a kind of innate decency. And I wonder if I have enough of that to matter.

The weapons people included three “blue-suiters” and two civilian experts from Eglin, one of whom Dar knew slightly. They had been briefed only on the target’s basic capabilities. As to the unspoken details, an Air Force colonel observed dryly, “Tonight’s story in the Atlanta Constitution about that missing stealth airplane with the hostage is, we can all agree, purest coincidence. Right?”

No one smiled or answered him aloud. Dar’s silent answer was, You only thought you were a career man, Colonel Koons.

The mounting of machine guns would have taken too long; rocket pods even longer—to Dar’s intense relief. It was Dar’s civilian acquaintance, Ernie Evanchow, whose solution came from left field. Short and grizzled like Ullmer, but with a young man’s quickness, Evanchow suddenly sat up straight after an hour of silent slouching. He spent a minute slashing feverishly on a piece of paper with a flowpen before holding up a sketch.

The sketch depicted a tiny parachute with a very long wire hanging beneath. “Hanging from the wire is United Technology’s latest caper, gentlemen,” Evanchow said, using the flowpen as a pointer. “The size of a rolled newspaper, mass about four kilos; sensor sets it off when it’s thirty meters above the ground. They’re airdropped from a munition pod the size of a barrel, about a hundred to the pod. Antipersonnel, actually. We call it Project Buckshot and we’ve got four pods at Eglin. Each of these little rounds is actually a submunition; it fires steel cubes downward in a conic pattern. Best of all, the firing sensor is sonic. Even if your airplane is plastic, it should bounce an echo.” He stopped, then said, as if passing on a tidbit of rare entertainment, “But the round wouldn’t have to fire to bring down a light aircraft.”

Only Ullmer got it at first. “You don’t even have to energize the warheads,” he said, “if the wire’s long enough.”

“Wire’s two hundred meters long”—Evanchow nodded—“hundreds of feet of wire hanging down with the live round on one end and a little drag chute on the other. Anything that flies through a forest of those little beauties will end up dragging ‘em along, chutes and all. Hell of a lot of drag, probably enough to bring the target mushing down pretty fast. If the pilot were good enough, he might manage a landing he could walk away from. Take us hours to disarm those warheads, though.”

Dar: “How many hours?”

Evanchow, after a brief mental calculation: “Three, maybe four per pod. You don’t want to rush that kind of work.”

“I say, go to it,” Dar announced.

Ben Ullmer, sitting next to Dar, spoke very softly into his ear. “This is the sticky point. Think about Sheppard’s reaction when he learns we’ve disarmed them all.”

The others were pretending not to listen. “You know what I’m thinking about, Ben.”

“So am I. So let’s ask for twice as many Buckshot pods as they can disarm before dawn. We take both kinds. We try the disarmed type first, if we get Corbett where we want him.”

And that was how it happened that each sturdy old P2V was loaded with one fully-armed Buckshot pod and one with disarmed rounds.

Before the supper he did not really want and the sterile room in officer quarters that he honestly dreaded as only a lonely man can, Dar checked in with Terry Unruh on a line that was both secure and scrambled. “You know where I’ll be,” he said after answering Unruh’s first questions, “so don’t hesitate to call me if anything breaks. I’ll be airborne by seven a.m.”

Unruh: “Only one more thing so far; a third sighting, I’m afraid.”

Dar, elated: “Afraid, hell! When and where?”

“About six this evening, by a Florida state patrolman who was looking up at a Peterbilt cab when your man Corbett flew over, heading south. I interviewed him myself, Hornet. The man hunts, and he knows a vulture from an eagle, or claims he does. Says this wasn’t anything he’d ever seen and its tail feathers didn’t look right, which made him think of a bulletin he’d seen when he went on-shift. He said, and I quote, ‘God damn if it didn’t just pop into sight like a ghost, tryin’ to look like a buzzard.’ I suspect Corbett has found out how to use that chameleon mode; Sheppard’s certain of it.”

“Wonderful,” Dar replied. “Where was it?”

“On I-10, about twelve miles east of Lake City. We’ve already got Navy and Air Force flying grids down the center of Florida, but NSA doesn’t think they’ll find anything.”

“Wait a minute,” Dar said, fumbling for pencil and paper.

“Let me save you the trouble,” said Unruh, his voice dropping slightly. “It’s just about equidistant between where you are, on the Atlantic coast, and the Gulf coast to the west. That makes it sixty miles to our shoreline either way you slice it, and a gentleman sitting across from me asked me to convey his deepest sympathy, with the reminder that the interagency agreement was seventy-five miles. I’m sorry to be the one who has to make it official, Hornet. Black Stealth One is now fair game for a kill, by whoever sees it first.”