“Let’s have a closer look at it, Jon,” Martindale said.
“Yes, sir. I’ll have it fly over slowly so we can take a look, then I’ll bring it in for a landing. Watch this flyby—you won’t believe it.” He picked up his walkie-talkie and tried to call his control center, but the laser beam had fried it. “I forgot to take it out of my pocket before the test,” he said sheepishly, smiling at the others’ muffled chuckles. “I lose more phones that way. Boomer…?”
“I got it, boss,” Boomer said. “Low and slow?” Jon nodded, and Boomer winked and radioed the mobile control van.
Moments later the XC-57 appeared on final approach. It leveled off just fifty feet above ground, flying amazingly slow for such a large bird, as if it were a huge balsa-wood model drifting gently on a soft breeze.
“Like a pregnant stealth bomber with the engines on the outside,” Martindale commented. “It looks like it’s going to fall out of the sky at any moment. How do you do that?”
“It doesn’t use any normal flight controls or lifting devices—it flies using mission-adaptive technology,” Masters said. “Almost every square inch of the fuselage and wings can be either a lift or drag device. It can be flown manned or unmanned. About sixty-five thousand pounds of payload, and it can take up to four standard cargo pallets.
“But the Loser’s unique system is a completely integral cargo handling capability, including the ability to move containers around inside while in flight,” Masters went on. “That was Boomer’s first idea when he came on board, and we’ve been scrambling to refit all of the production aircraft to include it. Boomer?”
“Well, the problem I’ve always seen with cargo planes is that once the cargo’s inside you can’t do anything with the plane, the space, or the cargo,” Boomer said. “They’re all wasted as soon as it’s loaded on board.”
“It’s cargo on a cargo plane, Boomer. What else are you going to do with it?” Martindale asked.
“Maybe it’s a cargo plane in one configuration, sir,” Boomer replied, “but move the cargo around and slip a modular container through an opening in the belly, and now the cargo plane becomes a tanker or a surveillance platform. It’s based on the same concept as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship that’s all the rage now—one ship that can do different missions depending on which hardware modules you put on board.”
“Plug and play? That simple?”
“It wasn’t easy to get the weight and balance, fuel system, and electrical systems to integrate,” Boomer admitted, “but we think we have the bugs worked out. We pump fuel around between the various tanks to maintain balance. Without the mission-adaptive system, I don’t think it would’ve been possible at all. The Loser can lift cargo or the mission modules inside through the cargo hatch or belly hatch—”
“Belly hatch?” Martindale interrupted him with a wink. “You mean the bomb bay?”
“It’s not a bomb bay, sir, it’s a cargo access hatch,” Jon retorted. “It used to have a bomb bay, and I didn’t think it was right to just seal it up—”
“So it became a ‘cargo access hatch,’” the former president said. “Got it, Doc.”
“Yes, sir,” Jon said, feigning exasperation at having to continually remind people of his point. “Boomer’s system automatically arranges the modules as necessary for the mission, plugs them in, and turns them on, all by remote control. It can do the same while in flight. When a module is needed or one is expended, the cargo handling system can replace it with another one.”
“What modules do you have available, Jon?” Martindale asked.
“We’re making up new ones every month, sir,” Jon said proudly. “Right now we have boom aerial refueling modules along with hose-and-drogue wingtip pods, which are installed on the ground and can refuel probe-equipped planes. We also have laser radar modules for air and ground surveillance with satellite datalink; infrared and electro-optical surveillance modules; and the active self-defense module. We’re pretty close on a netrusion module and a Flighthawk control system—launching, directing, and perhaps even refueling and rearming FlightHawks from the Loser.”
“Of course, we would want to do attack modules, too, if we could get permission from the White House,” Boomer interjected. “We’re doing pretty well with the high-powered microwave and laser-directed energy technology, so that might happen sooner rather than later—if we can convince the White House to let us proceed.”
“Boomer is highly motivated to say the least,” Jon added. “He won’t be happy until he gets a Loser into space.”
Martindale and McLanahan looked at each other, each instantly reading the other’s thoughts; they then looked at the otherworldly sight of the massive Loser aircraft gliding down the runway in that flying-saucer slow-motion pace.
“Dr. Masters, Mr. Noble…” President Martindale began. Just then, the XC-57 Loser suddenly accelerated with a powerful roar of its engines, climbing out at an impossibly steep angle and disappearing from sight within moments. Martindale shook his head, amazed all over again. “Where can we go to talk, boys?”
CHAPTER TWO
The road to Hades is easy to travel.
“Close the damn door before I start bawling like a damned baby,” Kurzat Hirsiz, president of the Republic of Turkey, said, wiping his eyes once again before putting away his handkerchief. He shook his head. “One of the dead was a two-year-old. Completely innocent. Probably couldn’t even pronounce ‘PKK.’”
Thin, oval-faced, and tall, Hirsiz was a lawyer, academic, and expert on macroeconomics as well as the chief executive of the Republic of Turkey. He’d served for many years as an executive director of the World Bank and lectured around the world on economic solutions for the developing world before being appointed prime minister. Popular throughout the world as well as in his homeland, he’d received the largest percentage of the vote of the members of the Grand National Assembly in the country’s history when he was elected president.
Hirsiz and his top advisers had just returned from a press conference in Çancaya, the presidential compound in Ankara. He had read the list of names of the dead that had been given to him a few moments before the televised briefing, and had then taken some questions. When he was told by a reporter that one of the dead was a toddler, he suddenly broke down, openly weeping, and abruptly ended the presser. “I want the names, phone numbers, and some details about all the victims. I will call them personally after this meeting,” Hirsiz’s aide picked up the phone to issue the orders. “I will attend each of the families’ services as well.”
“Don’t feel embarrassed breaking down like that, Kurzat,” Ayşe Akas, the prime minister, said. Her eyes were red as well, although she was known in Turkey for her personal and political toughness, something to which her two ex-husbands would certainly attest. “It shows you’re human.”
“I can just hear the PKK bastards laughing at the sight of me crying in front of a roomful of reporters,” Hirsiz said. “They win twice. They take advantage of both a lapse in security procedures and a lapse in control.”
“It just solidifies what we have been telling the entire world for almost three decades—the PKK is and always will be nothing but murderous slime,” General Orhan Sahin, secretary-general of the Turkish National Security Council, interjected. Sahin, an army general, coordinated all military and intelligence activities between Çancaya, the military headquarters at Baskanligi, and Turkey’s six major intelligence agencies. “It is the most devastating and dastardly PKK attack in many years, since the cross-border attacks of 2007, and by far the most daring. Fifteen dead, including six on the ground; fifty-one injured—including the commander of the Jandarma himself, General Ozek—and the tanker aircraft a complete loss.”