Norton just couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Man, you guys have been watching too many bad movies,” he said, starting to get out of the cockpit. “But you can do this one without me.”
Smitz decided it was time to get tough. He reached over and firmly sat Norton back down into the cockpit.
“Major Norton, you’re a military pilot, correct?” he began sternly.
Norton felt his jawbone tighten. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“And you’ve seen combat? And you are on the short list for shuttle flight training. And you wanted to fly black missions out of Dreamland? Right?”
Norton could only shrug. “Yeah, so?”
“So then flying is not the concern here, is it?”
Norton shook his head. “No, it isn’t the flying,” he mumbled. “I can fly anything. But—”
Smitz cut him off. “And to tell you the truth, Major, I’m not even sure why you were selected for this mission. But one reason, I believe, was your high rating on the adaptability section of the PS2. So—we know you can fly anything and we know you can adapt to just about any situation. What is the problem here then?”
“The problem is that there are about a million things that can go wrong with this plan,” Norton shot back. “Whatever the plan is!”
“But if you don’t know what the mission spec is,” Smitz argued, “how could you possibly know what could go wrong?”
Norton took a moment and tried to compose himself. He was losing this debate and he knew it.
“Look, you’re putting us in Iraqi copters, in Iraqi uniforms, I assume,” he said slowly, rolling each syllable off his tongue with contempt. “If just the slightest thing gets fucked up, and we get caught, they can shoot us all as spies. That’s just one reason.”
Smitz just shook his head. He was the exact opposite of Norton. He preferred to hash things out, compromise, with level heads and calm voices. It was the Harvard way of doing things.
“Then, Major, I suggest you and the others should do everything in your power not to get caught,” he said calmly. “I’m sure everyone from the President on down would prefer it that way.”
Norton could feel his face go red. His hands went into fists again. He was stuck and he knew it.
He took another survey of the Hind’s byzantine control panel. “Does anyone even know how to start this goddamn thing?”
Smitz looked to the small cluster of aircraft techs who had gathered nearby, drawn back from their coffee break by the raised voices. They’d heard Norton’s question, but their only reply was a chorus of shrugs. One man held up a manual that looked about a foot thick.
Smitz turned back to Norton.
“Let’s just say we’re working on that,” Smitz told him.
Norton groaned and put his head in his hands. “Man, I should have stayed in show business.”
Smitz gave him a friendly pat on the back. “Look on the bright side, Major,” he said.
Norton looked up at him. “There’s a bright side?”
Smitz nodded. “You could have been assigned to the aircraft that your friends Gillis and Ricco have to fly.”
This was true enough. In the next hangar over, Gillis and Ricco were going through their own trauma.
They were sitting side by side in a helicopter even larger than a Hind. Also of Russian design, it was known as the Mi-6 Hook.
This copter was not a gunship. It was a dedicated troop carrier/cargo hauler of immense proportions. When it first entered service in the mid-fifties, the Hook was the largest military helicopter ever to fly—so big, in fact, it had to be shipped to Seven Ghosts Key in pieces, and still it barely fit inside the second C-5 that had landed earlier in the night.
Put together, it was an astounding 136 feet long— more than a third of a football field. Its rotors were a gigantic 133 feet in diameter. Its power plant was a brutally strong pair of engines capable of nearly six thousand horsepower per engine. As a result, the Hook was the first helicopter to ever surpass three hundred kilometers an hour. This was extremely fast for any chopper.
Its vast cargo hold could carry seventy-five fully equipped soldiers or even a tank or two inside. It could lug a total of twelve tons in its belly and another nine with a pull line underneath. The copter also had wings sticking from its midsection. Again, their function was to provide lift for the enormous machine.
None of this was making a positive impression on Ricco or Gillis, though. They were sitting in the vast cockpit—it too was adorned with a multitude of lights, bells, buzzers, switches, and levers. All of it with Russian nameplates. All of it looking like it was made in the fifties, which it was.
The only things the pilots recognized were the steering columns, the throttles, and the refueling suite—all of them were similar to the instruments on their KC-10 Pegasus tanker. But this provided them with little comfort.
Rooney, the CIA base chief, had drawn the short straw and was giving them their first look at the Russian-built behemoth.
“You really don’t expect us to fly this thing, do you?” Ricco was asking him for about the hundredth time.
“Those are the orders,” Rooney told him for about the hundredth time.
But Gillis persisted—he was by far the most infuriated of the two.
“You have to be nuts,” he lashed out at Rooney. “We fly jets. Big jets. Big fucking American jets! This is a helicopter. A Russian-built helicopter. We can’t drive this thing.”
“You’ll have to learn,” Rooney said matter-of-factly. “It’s as simple as that. Look—they went through the trouble to modify it to your experience. With the steering columns and all. I’ve been assured that once you get the feel of this thing, it will handle just like your big tanker. That’s why you guys didn’t have to suffer inside those simulators.”
But Gillis and Ricco couldn’t be had that easily. Sticks and throttles did not a flying machine make. As it was, the cockpit looked like the dashboard of a tractor-trailer jammed into that of a compact car.
But it was the modifications to the back cargo bay that really had them worried. The vast insides had been stripped out and two enormous fuel bladders had been installed. Per the mission specs, they were presently full of aviation fuel, the stink of which was permeating the vast flight cabin.
“And is someone expecting us to fly all that gas somewhere?” Ricco demanded of Rooney. “If so, I can suggest to you about a hundred better ways to do it. Like, in a fuel ship. You know, the kind that floats on the water? I’m sure the Navy’s got more than a few of them.”
Rooney just shook his head. He wished now that he’d volunteered to orient Norton to his craft instead of these two.
“The idea is not to carry the fuel from one place to the other,” he explained calmly and slowly, like a professor to a couple dumbos held after class. “The idea is to carry it upstairs—so you can refuel others in flight. That’s what you two boys are good at, am I right?”
The pair of pilots looked back at him. This was the first they’d heard of this.
“Yes, we are fucking great at refueling—in a big go-damn jet!” Ricco half-shouted at him. “Why doesn’t anyone listen to us here? We’re not chopper pilots. No one here is.”
Rooney just stared at the ceiling of the copter’s cockpit. He was astounded by the number of tubes and wires running along its length. What the hell was inside them all? he wondered.