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.”