Rubbing at bleary eyes that felt like they’d been sandpapered, Hunter “Boomer” Noble slid behind the wheel of his Lincoln luxury sedan, hit its push-button ignition, and then bit down on a ferocious yawn. Do not start that or you’ll never stop, he thought tiredly. Instead, he ordered, “Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.”
The integrated voice-command system he’d set up to control the lights, air-conditioning, and other electronics in the house he was renting instantly obeyed. With a low rumble, the garage door rolled up — revealing a row of large, two-story homes across the street. With the sun still below the eastern horizon, lights showed behind only a few windows.
Carefully, Boomer backed out of the garage, down his driveway, and out onto the empty street. No other cars were in sight. Naturally. His neighbors were mostly up-and-coming executives working for some of the other tech companies lured to Battle Mountain by Sky Masters’ presence and subcontracts. But not even the eagerest beaver among them made a habit of heading to the office at this ungodly hour. That was a “pleasure” reserved for top-level Sky Masters executives and engineers since the bolt-from-the-blue sneak attack on Barksdale Air Force Base.
He put the Lincoln in gear and drove off. Behind him, his garage door rolled back down and locked automatically.
Boomer rolled through the nearest stop sign and took a left onto a bigger street that would take him to Interstate 80. Suddenly his headlights picked out a man wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a hooded maroon MIT sweatshirt standing right in the middle of the road — apparently trying to thumb a ride.
“Oh, man, you have got to be kidding me,” he snarled under his breath. Now they were getting guys to bum rides in his suburban neighborhood, and practically in the middle of the night? This was the kind of crap that people moved out of places like Las Vegas or San Francisco to escape. What was next? Upscale panhandlers trying to rustle spare change for a round of golf at the local public course?
Still grousing out loud to himself, Boomer started to pull around the would-be hitchhiker. Then he saw the crude, hand-lettered sign the other man held up. It read, will work for food for my wolf.
“Ah, hell,” he muttered, with almost resigned incredulity. “And here I thought today would be boring.” Scowling, he jammed on his brakes, bringing the big Lincoln to a full stop next to the hitchhiker. Silent now, he waited while the other man popped open the passenger door, climbed in, and flipped back the hood of his sweatshirt.
“Well, this is just great,” Boomer said with a wry smile. “So Bradley James McLanahan has come to call. With all the hell breaking loose in the world, I should have figured you’d be dropping by to visit your old pal Hunter Noble and his Sky Masters hangar full of super-duper, high-tech wonder planes.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Brad replied with a lopsided grin. “Hope I didn’t startle you too much.” He shrugged. “I’d have picked a less cloak-and-dagger way to get in touch, but I’m not supposed to be in the States at all, let alone here in Battle Mountain.”
Boomer snorted. “No kidding. If there’s anyone else in the world who’s more non grata as a persona, with both the feds and the Russians, than you and your Iron Wolf compadres, I’d be very surprised.” He raised an eyebrow. “Which makes me curious as to just how far you’re planning to ride with me this morning.”
“All the way to your office,” Brad said simply. “I need to brief you on some developments and I’d rather not do it outside a secure environment.”
“Yeah, see, there’s the problem,” Boomer told him with a frown. “Our corporate security guys have gotten a lot twitchier since someone kicked the crap out of Barksdale. They aren’t exactly going to let you come waltzing through the gate, even on my say-so.”
In response, the younger man unzipped his sweatshirt. A Sky Masters ID card was clipped to his shirt pocket. Made out in the name of someone named Michael Kelly, it showed a recent photo of Brad wearing a coat and tie and it looked completely genuine. Not only that, but the ID indicated that he was a “special projects engineer” for Sky Masters’ aerospace unit — the same outfit headed up by one Dr. Hunter Noble, Ph.D.
Boomer stared at it for a long second. Then he shook his head in disgust. “Don’t tell me… that shiny new ID of yours is already planted in our personnel system, too, right?”
“Yep.”
Boomer let out a breath. “How the hell did Martindale—?” Then he stopped himself and just held up a hand, with a deep, frustrated sigh. “Never mind, I really do not want to know.”
He grimaced. Every time the former U.S. president and current head of Scion pulled one of these spooky stunts, Sky Masters security people scrambled around like maniacs trying to plug whatever gaps he’d found in their systems. Martindale was one of the company’s best customers, despite Stacy Anne Barbeau’s efforts to close off their sales to him, so this was more like a game than anything more serious. But it was still a game Boomer was getting tired of losing.
“Mind telling me what you’re up to?” he asked finally.
“Right now?” Brad offered him a seriously shit-eating grin. “I’m going to grab a little shut-eye on the way into work. I put in a couple of incredibly long days just getting here, you know.” With that, he reclined the Lincoln’s comfortable leather passenger seat and closed his eyes.
Idly contemplating whether his neighbors would really mind so much finding a corpse sprawled across one of their nice, neat streets when they woke up, Boomer took his foot off the brake and drove on toward Sky Masters.
Brad looked around Boomer’s cluttered office while the other man sat down and fired up his office computer. Stacks of aircraft manuals, binders crammed full of engine specifications and test results, and printouts of other scientific and engineering data occupied almost every flat surface. Detailed models of every aircraft and spacecraft Hunter Noble had ever flown lined the shelves behind him.
He nodded at one of them,a class="underline" 64th-scale version of the sleek, single-stage-to-orbit S-19 Midnight spaceplane. It was a cutaway model, showing the S-19’s revolutionary triple-hybrid engines, which could transform from air-breathing supersonic turbofan engines to hypersonic ramjets to pure rocket engines. “Getting any flight time these days?”
Boomer looked up from his computer and followed Brad’s gesture. “On the S-19s?” With a sour look, he shook his head. “Zero. Zip. Nada. All of our spaceplanes are mothballed for now. Stacy Anne Barbeau is allergic to orbital operations, especially by anything with the Sky Masters logo on the side.”
“What’s her excuse? Too expensive?” Brad asked.
“Nope, it’s not that,” Boomer replied. “She’s all about spending taxpayer money… but only as long as the money stays well inside the earth’s atmosphere.”
“And ends up in the pockets of contractors who back her politically?” Brad guessed.
Boomer snorted. “I hate to hear someone so young sounding so cynical.”
“Especially when I’m right?”
“Well, yeah,” Boomer admitted. He rocked back in his chair. “But I bet you didn’t come all this way to Nevada just to talk politics.” His eyes narrowed. “And I really hope you weren’t planning to acquire another one of the X-planes we’ve got stashed out in Hangar Five. Because I can tell you that’s a total nonstarter, in the current circumstances.”
Brad shook his head, hiding a grin. Though he would never probably confess it openly, it was pretty clear that Boomer hated the idea of letting any of the highly advanced prototypes stored here at Battle Mountain slip through his fingers. Most of them were the products of the late Jon Masters’ irreplaceable genius. Every one of them was literally one of a kind. They incorporated revolutionary technologies and design concepts that might someday be applied to new aviation projects. Watching any of those experimental aircraft fly off into danger with the Iron Wolf Squadron or some other Scion covert outfit must be like seeing one of your kids ride a tricycle out into traffic.