The communications screen indicated they had a link, and Chuck appeared, his silver hair expertly razored into a crew cut, his face barely wrinkled for a man pushing sixty. Stanton had already broken that barrier, and he wanted to believe he looked as good as Chuck. Aw, hell, who was he kidding?
“Hey, Donny.”
“Hey, Chuck. Listen, I just got an e-mail from American Eagle telling me we’ve got total control of the Iridium cell phone system. He wants us to reach out to your boy up north. I was just reading his record.”
“Andreas is a pretty clever lad. Once he figures out the satellite is bent, he just might poke up his sail long enough to check for a text message. But how can I help?”
“My techies tell me they need the phone numbers for every Iridium 9505A onboard Florida, plus we need something — something personal — that will convince Andreas that our text message is legit. I know how serious you guys are about the silent in silent service.”
“I’ll get the squadron commander on the horn. Smitty keeps a roster of all the allocated 9505As, and next I’ll give Andreas’s wife a buzz. I’ll bet she can come up with something personal to authenticate with.”
“Sounds like a plan, Chuck. My best to Jamie. Fifteen minutes?”
“Back in fifteen, Admiral.”
“Captain, we’ve covered—”
“Hold on,” Commander Jonathan Andreas said, cutting off his communications officer. “Right now I want to hear Senior Chief Radioman Sheldon’s assessment of the situation.”
“Captain, I’ve been over every inch of that gear. I even got Chief Electronics Technician Burgess to look over my shoulder. I swear that the ELF and satellite receivers are good to go.” His tone grew ominous. “There’s just no signal.”
Andreas couldn’t estimate how much pride calling in another chief for help had cost his senior chief radioman.
Andreas nodded, “Sheldon, that’s good enough for me.”
Andreas returned to his quarters and sat on his bunk for almost ten minutes, allowing himself to work through the mystery, taking in each piece of evidence, examining it, probing it, trying to reach conclusions. Then he started down a new path, one in which they took action to get answers.
He came up with two plans.
Finally, he stood and purposefully stepped through the doorway into the head separating his stateroom from the XO’s. He knocked twice on the door in the opposite bulkhead, then stepped through to where the XO was reading something at his desk. He glanced up. “Sir?”
Without preamble, Andreas said, “XO, I’m about to break a cardinal rule, and I want you to hear it.”
“Skipper, are you sure?”
“Yes, I am.” The first plan sounded even more logical to him as he voiced it rapid-fire. “I’m going to go deep, sprint thirty miles northwest, stick up the antenna, and ping the transponder on the satellite. The problem could still be ours, but right now it’s the next-to-last action we can take. What do you think?”
“Skipper, with the shrouded propulsor, and at a depth of, say, eight hundred feet, we can do that.”
“I just can’t wait around any longer.”
“No doubt. We sprint at nearly thirty knots and find us a nice lonely spot out in the middle of the gulf.”
“So it’s worth a try?”
“It is, but I have to play devil’s advocate — what happens if we don’t trigger an answering ping from the transponder?”
“I said this was my next-to-last plan, XO. If this doesn’t work, you won’t believe what I’ll do next.”
THIRTEEN
“Ghost Hawk, this is Siren. Contact is now three minutes out, over.”
Major Stephanie Halverson, dressed like a praying mantis in her pressure suit and alien-like helmet with attached O2 line, took a deep breath and adjusted her grip on the stick.
The F-35B Joint Strike Fighter’s electro-optical targeting system (EOTS) continued to feed her up-to-the-nanosecond images and data on the approaching targets, and her helmet-mounted display system had some of the best head-tracking hardware and software she had ever fielded, along with all the usual requirements like a binocular-wide field of view, day/night capability with sensor fusion, and a digital image source for helmet-displayed symbology — all of which was engineer-speak for some wicked cool battlefield capability.
After an unusually long delay, her wingman, Captain Jake Boyd, finally replied with a curt “Roger that,” his own F-35B streaking over the frozen tundra just off Halverson’s right wing, its tail glowing faintly in the night.
“Ghost Hawk, do you have a problem, over?”
“Negative, Siren. Just shaking my head.”
They had nearly forty Russian Ka-29s on the AN/ APG-81 AESA radar, the helos on a bearing due south across the Northwest Territories, maintaining an altitude of just one thousand feet.
To say that Halverson and Boyd were surprised was an understatement.
Operating out of a small JSF training base located approximately two hundred miles north of Yellowknife, the capital of the NWT, she and Boyd were on their third scheduled night flight of the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) fighter used primarily by the United States Marine Corps and the Royal Navy.
As JSF pilots and members of the Air Force, they were being cross-trained in the fighter so that its features could be exploited in non-carrier based operations located far inland and in more rugged terrain. The JSF had struck a deal with the commissioner of the NWT to use the largely unpopulated areas for tests.
Halverson and Boyd had both hoped that after the fourteen-day training mission, they’d get a chance to take their state-of-the-art killing machines into Russia and show those vodka-soaked wolves what they could do.
That the Russians would help by dropping in themselves was as exciting as it was troubling.
Halverson maintained a video blog, Femme Fatale Fighter Pilot, and she couldn’t wait to share this with her readers, though she’d carefully dance around the classified details, and her face was always hidden behind her helmet.
“All right, Ghost Hawk, two minutes now,” she reported. “Let’s hit the gas and ascend before they spot us.”
“Roger that.”
“Igloo Base, this is Siren, we’re climbing to fourteen thousand to hover and observe contact, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. Igloo Base standing by.”
She and Boyd climbed to fourteen thousand, then, with the targets about to pass below in thirty seconds, they prepared to hover.
All right, baby, show me what you got.
Instead of utilizing lift engines or rotating nozzles on the engine fan and exhaust like the old Harriers, Halverson’s F-35B employed a shift-driven lift fan, patented by Lockheed Martin and developed by Rolls-Royce.
The contra-rotating fan was like a turboprop set into the fuselage, just behind the cockpit. Engine shaft power could be sent forward to it while bypass air from the cruise engine was sent to nozzles in the wings as the cruise nozzle at the tail vectored downward.
Thus, under her command, panels opened over the lift fan behind her, and a column of cool air providing 20,000 pounds of lifting power vented from the bottom of the aircraft, holding her steady, a fighter plane seemingly locked in the air by an invisible tractor beam.
Boyd was at Halverson’s wing, hovering as well.
“Siren, this is Igloo Base.”
“Go ahead, Igloo.”
“We’ve received no response from your contact. You have authorization to fly by those helos, attempt once more to make contact yourselves. Instruct them to turn around — but do not engage unless fired upon, over.”