The elevator hunted a bit, and the door slid aside. The overhead fluorescents revealed an expanse twice the size of a basketball gym but with a flat ceiling thirty feet high, the floor of another hangar directly overhead. “This is Black Hangar,” said Ullmer, leading the way with a gesture that was unnecessary because everyone was already staring. “We cannibalized Blue Sky One, so I can’t show her to you, but there’s Two and Three.”
Murmurs of appreciation. Two slender shapes loomed silently against the wall, one suspended above the other by slender metal beams cantilevered from the wall. Those spidery supports suggested that the aircraft was feather-light, though it had sturdy wheels folded flush into the wing. Both craft sported canopies that bulged above the wings, and twin tails mounted on extension tubes that seemed slender as pencils. The wing of the lower craft was covered with fabric, painted blue below, mottled brown above. The two shapes were subtly different, but they looked more like sailplanes than powered craft.
“The lower one’s Blue Sky Two, powered by a pair of little French turbo units.” Ben strolled with his visitors, whose heads kept swinging to scan the sweep of those wings as they approached. “Wingspan’s a tad over forty feet, crew of one. Engines buried in the fuselage, so the locals never paid much attention to her. Helluva lot of high-performance sailplanes around Elmira, you know.”
Although the upward slope of the wing put its tip eight feet above concrete, Charles Foy reached it with ease, tapping gently with a finger. “Plastic?”
“And carbon fiber,” Ullmer nodded with the squint of a critic. “The crew got experience with superstrength materials when we formed those tips. They’re a little wonky,” he added, “but we’ve done better since. A lot better. These were just practice for the materials and processes of the final bird.”
Sheppard, whose memory rivaled Marie’s, had evidently read every progress report on the craft. “Did you ever manage to lower its infrared signature?”
“No way,” Ullmer admitted. “We got the exhaust spread enough so it’s not visible, but on any good IR scope it’s a goddamn beacon in the sky. Besides its heat signature, it’s still vulnerable to radar, which just pokes right through fabric and plywood and spots the metal in the engines. Not so much on Number Three. For one thing, we put Schiff-base salts in her paint. Very high radar absorption, not as much of a signal. Basically, Two is a wood-and-fabric bird. It’d burn like a boxkite if you lit a match to it.”
He ducked under the wing, motioning the others to follow, and pointed to the craft that hung above. “We built Blue Sky Three as a two-place with shrouded pusher props. A little heavy because of the skin heaters. Y’see, the skin of the entire airchine is stretched over a matrix of little electric heat strips. With heat-sensitive paint, this airchine can change color like a chameleon. We’re talking more heat than you’d get from skin friction or sunlight, of course, so it carries a little weight penalty.” Ullmer paused for one beat. “Not exactly the same as bein’ invisible, but close. A long step in that direction. Naturally we had to uprate the engine power. Pair of little Rotax engines at first, but then we went to some air-cooled rotary jobs of our ownif anybody cares,” he said, wondering if anybody but Sheppard gave a damn.
To his surprise, CIA’s Randolph did too. He cocked his handsome profile over, nodding, and spoke as if to himself. “Thousand-mile range, low observables, two-man crew. Dr. Sheppard briefed us at last week’s Security Council meeting,” he said by way of explanation.
That must’ve been one bastard of a meeting for Foy and Sheppard, thought Ullmer, with the President watching while they admitted how we tried an end-run around CIA. “Well then. Any questions?”
“Several,” Randolph assured him, “beginning with whether Blue Sky Three is fully operational.”
“You betcha,” Ullmer said. It was evident that the others awaited his answer with more than casual interest.
Abraham Randolph was not finished, however. “Could it, for example, fly a mission over Fort Meade without detection?”
Ben Ullmer stood perfectly still, considering the question of flight over NSA’s own headquarters as if it were a reasonable scenario. Then: “Depends on whether Dr. Sheppard’s boys were lookin’ specifically for it, Mr. Randolph. If they weren’t, it probably could. Little blip on a scope, maybe.”
Now it was Weston, for the first time, who pressed the issue. “Is Blue Sky Three advanced very much beyond anything the Other Side is flying?”
Jesus, what a question! CIA itself controls the finest fleet of spy aircraft on earth. Of obsolete spy aircraft, some imp of ego reminded him. “All I know is what our guys and your guys tell me,” Ullmer shrugged. “My guess is, the Sovs would wet their pants if they knew what this bird can do. As I understand it, they don’t even know about the chameleon skin yet, never mind the range and the low IR and radar signal.”
A subtle relaxing among his visitors, and a glance between Weston and Randolph. “Good enough,” Randolph said as if it were of no importance; but Ben Ullmer knew, somehow, that it was very important. The CIA leader cleared his throat, with a glance at Charles Foy, and mixed a metaphor full of frosty humor: “And now, if we could see a bird of a different color…”
“Black Stealth One.” It was Sheppard who said it, the phrase an incantation assuring Ben that it was all right, that these men too were priests of high technology, bowing before the same altars.
Ben Ullmer nodded his head toward the far wall, a towering partition with massive panels on caster wheels. “Right,” he sighed, and led them to an ordinary metal-faced door in one of those panels.
Ben watched their faces as they stepped through into an expanse as great as the one they had left. He took no pleasure in their silent awe, feeling instead that he was giving up his virginity. They had murmured in excitement at the sight of the Blue Sky craft, but no one spoke as they stared at Black Stealth One.
Ben gave them time for it to sink in, expecting the reaction because he still felt it himself when gazing at this creature, a vast bird of passage crafted from filament and ceramic. Like your first sight of an albatross in flight or a perfect-bodied ballerina en pointe, every line seemed so natural, so right, you wondered why any other kind existed. And you smiled, and you let the goose bumps travel over your skin until that magical moment of pure pleasure had passed.
It had no ordinary wheels; only tiny casters on skids. No fuselage to speak of and no tail at all, only slender swept wings subtly twisted at their tips, spanning fully sixty feet with low rudders, canted inward, far out on the wings. In repose, the wings sagged as if the bird were exhausted.
Its surface was not black, but a dull gray, glass-smooth and absorbent of light though pinpoints of sheen glistened like dew on its hide. A huge duct yawned like a manta ray’s gullet in front of the wing, and it extended back to a circular exhaust vent behind the wings. A two-seat cockpit pod was suspended inside that duct, protruding aggressively forward like the head and neck of a live thing. The pod’s shape was that of a flat-nosed bullet, and its canopy bulged on each side, resembling the multifaceted eyes of some enormous alien insect. Once you were near it, you could not escape the feeling that it was watching you for the slightest mistake, for a chance to inhale you through that gullet that seemed to have half swallowed its pod. An immense, all-seeing winged predator, waiting for an excuse to huntor for unwary prey to come nearer.
“Some of the crew call it the hellbug,” Ben said to break the spell, and then raised his voice, “Medina! You asleep in there?”