“Helen’s a shrewd businesswoman,” Martindale told him. “Shrewd enough to know the difference between a hundred million in sunk costs gathering dust in a hangar and thirty million dollars or so in cold, hard cash — or at least its digital equivalent.”
Boomer stared at him. “She took thirty million? For the Ranger prototype? You’re shitting me.”
“Not in the least,” Martindale assured him, smiling smugly. “Dr. Kaddiri has already verbally approved our acquisition. You can confirm that with her if you like.” He smiled thinly. “But as a precaution, I would recommend finding somewhere safe from FBI, CIA, and NSA eavesdropping before you do.”
“Yeah, well there’s the biggest roadblock of all,” Boomer pointed out. “Now that Barbeau’s on the warpath against Scion, we’ve got the feds crawling over our facilities day and night — inventorying every piece of flyable hardware we own. With special attention being paid to advanced aircraft like the Ranger.”
He turned toward Brad. “It already took a hell of a lot of finagling to smuggle out those last couple of CIDs your Iron Wolf guys needed, and those robots are small enough to conceal inside a shipping crate full of other crap.”
“Your point being?” Martindale asked.
Boomer shrugged his shoulders. “That even if you’re planning to strip the XCV-62 all the way down to its component parts, there’s no way you’ll get it out of Battle Mountain past the feds, let alone all the way to Poland.”
“Sure there is,” Brad said, with total confidence.
Boomer eyed him suspiciously. “How?”
“Nadia and I will fly it out.”
Boomer felt his jaw drop open. Recovering fast, he shook his head. “Like hell you will.”
“Why not?” Brad asked.
“For one thing, no matter how shit hot a pilot you are, you can’t just hop into an airplane you’ve never flown before and handle it safely.”
Brad shrugged his broad shoulders. “That’s what full-motion computer simulators are for, Boomer. We can reconfigure one of the flight simulators in Hangar Two for the XCV-62 and squeeze in a few hours later tonight — when all the wannabe commercial-jet trainees are out in the bars or in bed.”
Boomer nodded slowly. Much as he hated to admit it, that part of Brad’s scheme made sense. Sky Masters owned some of the most advanced full-flight simulators in the world. And a sizable chunk of its revenues came from the fees its instructors and computer programs earned by teaching prospective pilots how to fly everything from two-seater turboprops to superadvanced fifth-generation fighter jets like the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. Plus, Brad had already proved himself a fast learner when it came to flying.
Then he shook his head decisively. “Even if you can figure out how to fly the beast in time, there’s still no way you can pull this stunt off.”
“I find your lack of faith disturbing,” Brad said, deepening his voice.
“Very funny, Darth McLanahan,” Boomer retorted. “Look, Brad… the Ranger is reasonably stealthy, okay? But against radar. It’s not freaking invisible to the naked eye.”
“So?” Brad asked innocently.
“So as soon as you taxi out onto the runway past those hangar doors, the friendly local FBI agents camped out on our doorstep are going to start screaming bloody murder. And once that happens, you are toast. Between the USAF Aggressor Squadron down at Nellis and the Navy Top Gun gang at Fallon, you’ll have F-18s and F-16s coming down hard on your ass before you fly a hundred miles downrange.”
“No, we won’t,” Brad said. He looked at Boomer with the faint hint of a barely suppressed grin. “Before Sky Masters built the Ranger, you put together a couple of full-scale design mock-ups, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Boomer said slowly, still not sure where this was heading. “That’s standard aerospace-engineering practice. Mock-ups let us check things like aerodynamics and refine the human-factors stuff like figuring out the most efficient cockpit layouts.”
“Do you still have them?”
“Well, sure. You know how Jon was. He never threw anything away if he could help it,” Boomer said, shrugging. “So every piece of crap from the Ranger project is crated up in long-term storage somewhere at our facility here.” His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Patience, Dr. Noble,” Nadia interjected with smile of her own. “All will be made clear soon enough.”
Brad thanked her with a flick of his eyes and went on. “The XCV-62’s engines are standard commercial types, right?”
Boomer nodded. “Yeah, they’re off-the-shelf Rolls-Royce Tay 620-15 turbofans. You know the Sky Masters philosophy: never reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. Designing new engines for every airframe just adds cost, complexity, and delay.”
“So if you had to, you could scrounge up some spares, right?” Brad asked.
“Sure. Why?”
Brad broke into an unrestrained, boyish grin. “You mean you haven’t figured out my incredibly cool plan yet?”
Boomer winced. There was almost nothing he hated worse than being the last one to a party. He adopted an old man’s quavering tone. “Show a little mercy to an aging wreck, okay? I’m hitting thirty-five later this year. I may still have the body of a Greek god, but my brain may be going soft.”
At least that bit earned him a delighted laugh from Nadia. Even if she was obviously attached at the hip to one of his friends, it was nice to know she was paying attention.
“Fair enough, old man,” Brad said, grinning even wider. “See, here’s how I see things playing out…”
While he listened to the younger man run through the details of his plan, Boomer found himself shaking his head in awestruck wonder.
When Brad finished, he whistled softly. “Man, up to now, I never figured I’d meet anyone more willing to push the envelope on seriously, bad-to-the-bone, balls-to-the-wall crazy than General Patrick McLanahan. I guess that means insanity really is genetic.”
For just a split second, Brad’s smile slipped.
Oops, Boomer thought. He’d hit some kind of nerve there. He wondered what it was.
“Does that mean you’ll help us?” Brad asked quietly.
“Oh, hell, yeah,” Boomer said, clapping Brad on the shoulder to try to get past the moment. “You can definitely count me in. Because, I mean, how could I possibly pass up the chance to wind up in federal prison on a count of grand theft of a top-secret stealth aircraft?”
TWELVE
Two Polish F-16C Vipers slid through a clear night sky above the Polish capital. Since it was peacetime and they were operating in Warsaw’s often crowded airspace, both fighters had their navigation lights on. Otherwise, their mottled light and dark gray camouflage would have rendered them almost invisible at anything more than a couple of hundred yards.
“Tiger flight, fly heading zero-nine-zero, climb and maintain five thousand meters,” a calm voice said through Colonel Pawel Kasperek’s headset. “Nearest civilian traffic is a LOT Polish Airlines 737–400 thirty-five kilometers away at your eleven o’clock and descending. No bogeys detected at this time.”
Kasperek glanced back over his left shoulder through the F-16’s clear canopy. There, well below his current altitude and far off in the distance, he could see the airliner’s bright white anticollision strobes as it came in for a landing at Warsaw’s Chopin International Airport. The regularly scheduled night flight from London Heathrow was arriving on schedule. He clicked his mike. “Acknowledged, Warsaw Operations Center, Tiger flight, heading zero-nine-zero degrees, climbing to five thousand.”