“I’ve had Sybyl scan but no sign.”
A technician came running down the hallway. She held a small metal case in her hand. “Here’s the SATCOM link you asked for.”
Dalton took it. He walked through the door into the hangar. The blades were already turning on the Blackhawk, and the side door was open.
“Good luck!” Jackson said.
“Don’t go over until it’s clear,” Dalton warned her one last time.
“I won’t.”
Dalton climbed on board the chopper. As he slid the door shut, the platform began sliding out of the side of the mountain. The last thing he saw as they lifted off was Lieutenant Jackson watching him fly away.
Oma stared at her computer screen. Two deposits of four hundred million were sitting side by side in their separate accounts. Her husband had always told her to have her options open, to never play her hand until the last minute. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the clock. There was still time to play this just right.
Chapter Twenty-four
Sergeant Major Dalton woke as the Blackhawk settled down onto the grass next to the concrete runway at Denver International Airport. Several phone calls from the National Security Council had shut down one of the runways twenty minutes ago. Police cars, lights flashing, were parked near the end of the runway.
“Your ride is about two minutes out,” the pilot informed Dalton through the headset.
Dalton opened the side door and stepped off the chopper, carrying the com link. He could see the white-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains to the west. The airport itself was surrounded by miles of open rolling plain. The white peaks of the uniquely designed terminal were about two miles away, but Dalton had no intention of going there.
He scanned the sky and was rewarded when he spotted a small dot rapidly approaching from over the mountains. It closed swiftly, the shape not that of a normal plane, but more a solid V-form without wings.
As it got closer and slowed on its approach, Dalton could make out details. It was over 250 feet long and a hundred feet from tip to tip at the widest part. The best Dalton could describe the aircraft was that it was shaped like a stretched-out B-2 bomber.
Nose up, it came down toward the far end of the runway from Dalton. He knew that many in the terminal and waiting planes were getting the first public glimpse of one of the most classified projects in the Black Budget, but apparently the decision makers on the National Security Council felt that was a small price to pay for the mission he had to accomplish. Besides, a toy manufacturer had already designed and was selling a model that looked very similar to what was landing; they even had the name right: the SR-75 Penetrator, developed under the project code name Aurora.
The wheels touched down and the plane decelerated. Dalton could see smoke coming from the tires as they tried to halt the forward momentum. He knew about the plane from classified briefings he had attended while assigned to a top secret antiterrorist task force. At its home base at Groom Lake in Nevada, near Nellis Air Force Base and the infamous Area 51, the plane used a runway— the longest runway in the world— over seven miles long to take off and land. It was straining to stop even on DIA’s longest main runway.
But the pilots accomplished the task, slowing to a roll about five hundred yards from Dalton’s location, then bringing the plane toward him. The skin of the craft was a dull black, the small windows in the front hard to spot. The design lines were smooth and sleek.
The plane halted and a hatch opened in the belly between the two large sets of landing gear. Dalton started forward as a ladder extended down. He grabbed the bottom rung and climbed on board.
The man who greeted him was wearing a high-pressure suit, the mask on his helmet swung open. “I’m Major Or-rick, recon officer. I don’t know who the hell you are, but you sure got some pull to get us out in public like this.”
Dalton shook the man’s hand, introducing himself. They were standing in a small space, another ladder leading out of it. Orrick pulled the bottom ladder in and sealed the hatch. He pointed up. “Follow me.”
Dalton climbed behind him into a room crowded with electrical gear and computer screens. There was barely room for both of them to fit.
“This is my area,” Orrick said. He handed Dalton a pressure suit and helmet. “One size fits all when the size is extra large.” He jerked a thumb toward a four-foot-high opening in the front of the compartment. “Cockpit is that way. Better get that on and get up there. The pilot would really like to know what he’s doing and where we’re going.”
The entire plane was vibrating from the engines. Dalton could feel the small movements indicating it was taxiing. He quickly stepped into the pressure suit and pulled it up. He crouched down and made his way down the tight corridor. There were dim red lamps lighting it and the glow of daylight about twenty-five feet ahead. He poked his head out the corridor.
The pilot and copilot were strapped tightly into their form-fitting crash seats, half reclining back, the seats canted up so they could see out the four small windows. The rest of the front was taken up with instrumentation.
The man in the right seat turned his head slightly, seeing movement out of the corner of his eye.
“You Dalton?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Colonel Searl. World War III starting or something?”
“It could,” Dalton said.
Both men twisted in their seats to get a better look. “What the hell does that mean?” Searl said.
The SR-75 was pointing down the main runway, holding. “Maybe we ought to get airborne, then I’ll fill you in.”
“Where are we going?” Colonel Searl asked.
“That’s something else I’ve got to find out once we get airborne. All I can tell you right now is, we’re heading for someplace in Russia.” He held up the case holding the SATCOM. “I need to hook into your commo system to find out exactly where we’re going.”
Searl returned his attention to the front. “You better get back there and settled in. We’ll be airborne in less than a minute. We’ll head for the polar route; it’s the quickest way to Russia, but you need to give us a more specific location pretty quick because Russia is a damn big country.”
Dalton returned down the corridor to the recon officer’s space. Orrick had folded down a small seat, and he helped Dalton settle onto it, buckling him into it just as the plane began moving.
Colonel Searl rolled up the throttle on the plane’s conventional turbojet engine, and the large plane began accelerating down the runway. It took the plane over two and a half miles, just about to the end of the runway, before the delta wings produced enough lift for the wheels to separate from the ground.
With the turbojet engine at max thrust, the pilot continued to gain altitude and speed. Dalton was slammed back into the seat, the straps holding him cutting into his suit. He could feel the strong vibration of the engines.
“We’re passing through Mach 2 now,” Orrick informed Dalton. “We’re already over the Colorado-Wyoming border.”
It had been less than five minutes since takeoff. Dalton opened up the SATCOM and tossed one end of the cable to Orrick.
“We’re going high,” Orrick continued as he plugged in the cable. He looked down at his console. “We’re passing through fifty thousand feet. When we get close to sixty thousand, the pilots switch over to the PDWE. Pulsed-detonation-wave engine,” he clarified. “It’s pretty simple— we’ve got a bunch of high-strength compression chambers in the back. We pump a special mixture into them, they explode in sequence, forming a high-pressure pulse, and they are guided into a combustion chamber which channels it out the rear.”