“I want access as soon as it’s uploaded, Boomer,” Sattler said. “I want immediate access.”
“I need to make sure I have the data first, Sattler,” Boomer said. “Then I’ll pass it out. But I need to know I have it all first.”
“That’s not how it works, Boomer,” Sattler said. “When you get it, I get it. That’s the deal. You know it; I know it. Do it. What you have, I have, all of it, right now. Clear?”
He nodded toward the pillar of black smoke now curling up from behind the distant ridge on the monitors. “I just crashed a hundred-million-dollar prototype, Sattler,” Boomer said, his voice breaking and his eyes distant. “I just lost a hundred mil. You want to share some of that loss? Be my friggin’ guest.”
FBI special agent Raymond Sattler swallowed hard as the twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter tilted sharply, circling low over the floodlit crash site. Always uneasy in the air, he found this hurried flight high into the craggy, pitch-black foothills west of Battle Mountain nerve-racking. Seeing Hunter Noble’s grim features did nothing to calm his fears. Even knowing the Sky Masters aerospace-engineering chief was probably more worried about losing his job than he was about dying in a helicopter wreck wasn’t much comfort.
A pattern of five small green beacons appeared ahead through the cockpit windscreen.
Sattler heard their pilot though the headphones he’d been given before takeoff. “I have the LZ in sight. Hang tight, guys. This may be a little bumpy.”
Oh, swell, the FBI agent thought.
Slowing fast, the Bell helicopter flared in and landed on a rutted dirt track that ran along the ridge, close to where the Sky Masters stealth aircraft had crashed. It bounced once on its skids and then settled. Up front, in the cockpit, the pilot flicked a few switches. Immediately both engines began whining down.
Following Noble, Sattler climbed out of the helicopter and moved off into the darkness, climbing uphill toward an array of dazzling lights marking the downed aircraft. A chill wind out of the northwest seemed to cut right through the jacket he’d borrowed. Clouds were rolling in, gradually blotting out the stars.
The portable lights rigged up by Sky Masters emergency crews revealed a tangle of blackened, smoldering wreckage strewn across the slope. Men and women in silvery fire proximity suits moved through the debris field, using handheld extinguishers to put out small blazes or taking pictures and making notes.
To the FBI agent’s untrained eye, it looked as though the batwinged stealth plane had slammed nose first into the ground and then exploded. He turned toward Hunter Noble. “Shouldn’t your guys wait to start checking things out until one of the NTSB’s investigative teams gets here?” The National Transportation Safety Board’s “Go Teams” were groups of specialists charged with investigating major aviation accidents. Members on the duty rotation were expected to be reachable twenty-four hours a day, ready to head to any crash site as fast as possible.
Noble shook his head. “The NTSB won’t be investigating this crash.”
Sattler frowned. “Why not?”
“Because its investigators don’t have the necessary security clearances, Agent Sattler,” the other man said, with a sigh. He nodded toward the wreckage. “We built that XCV-62 with advanced stealth materials and dozens of other top-secret components. There’s no possible way DoD could vet the NTSB guys in time.”
The FBI agent nodded slowly, knowing he was right. Obtaining Top Secret security clearances could take between four and eight months. “Okay, then why not call in an accident team from the Defense Department? They must have specialists with the right clearances.”
“I’m sure they do,” Hunter Noble agreed. He shrugged his shoulders gloomily. “But the Ranger wasn’t flying as part of an active military procurement program or competition.”
“Which means what exactly?”
“It means the Pentagon won’t waste a dime figuring out why the XCV-62 augured in,” Noble said. “As far as they’re concerned, we just lost an aircraft they never asked us for anyway. All they’ll care about is that we secured the site and recovered every piece of our stealth materials and technology.”
“What about your corporate insurer?” Sattler asked. “They’ll demand an impartial investigation, won’t they?”
The other man smiled wryly. “Nobody insures experimental prototypes, Agent Sattler. Not at prices anyone wants to pay. Even Lloyd’s of London laughs in our face, and they insure dancer’s knees and opera singer’s vocal cords.” Moodily, he scuffed at the ground with his boots. “Nope. Nobody else is going to want a piece of this action. Not even the Lander County Sheriff’s Office.”
“Why not?” Sattler asked, confused.
“Because the Ranger was unmanned, so nobody was hurt or killed in the wreck. On top of that, this is all Sky Masters — owned land,” Noble explained. He winced. “No, this was a bet we made all on our own. So now we get to try figuring out what went wrong… using our own money. Which is going to make the board of directors really, really unhappy.”
FIFTEEN
Brad McLanahan couldn’t help grinning like a maniac as the XCV-62 swooped and soared, climbing and diving as it streaked low over a broken, bewildering landscape of canyons, cliffs, buttes, and mesas at 450 knots. “This must be the world’s longest roller-coaster ride,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Sweet, isn’t it?”
“You do know how to show a girl a good time,” Nadia Rozek agreed dryly. She was sitting in the cockpit’s right-hand seat, acting as his copilot and systems operator.
Brad laughed. Like the XF-111 Super Varks he’d flown into combat last year, the Ranger prototype was equipped with a digital terrain-following system. Between the detailed maps stored in its onboard computers and short, periodic bursts from its radar altimeter, they could speed across the ground at an altitude of just two hundred feet — even in this otherwise baffling maze of natural wonders.
He tweaked his stick slightly left, following the glowing visual cues displayed on his HUD. The Ranger banked slightly, racing past a sheer-walled mesa that rose high above them. It vanished astern in seconds.
An icon began flashing on Nadia’s left-hand MFD. “We’re receiving an encrypted transmission via satellite,” she said crisply, tapping virtual “keys” on the display to decode the compressed signal. “Message reads: ‘I owe you twenty.’” Puzzled, she looked across the cockpit at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means our deception plan worked,” Brad said, with a sudden feeling of relief. “Boomer bet me ten bucks at two-to-one odds that it wouldn’t.”
In truth, even though it had been his plan, he was almost surprised that they’d actually pulled it off. I must have shared more of Hunter Noble’s skepticism than I realized, he thought. In theory, setting up the fake crash had been comparatively simple and straightforward, but making it succeed in real life had required precise timing… and depended far more on luck than was usually wise.
First, they’d loaded up a C-130 with an assortment of aircraft components — bits and pieces from earlier XCV-62 mock-ups, four turbofan engines of the right make, and a couple of impact-resistant drop tanks full of fuel and rigged with command-detonated explosives. Then, while the real Ranger taxied out of Hangar Five, supposedly “remote-piloted” by Tom Rogers, the Hercules had flown low over a preselected point out of sight of McLanahan Airport and dumped the “wreckage” out of its cargo hold.