Even before the muffled reply, Black Stealth One rocked slightly on its skids, a monster flexing mighty wings. Aldrich took a step backward, startled. “Yo,” a voice called from inside the creature. “In the port wing fairing, Ben.” Only a slender man could fit inside that wing.
“I know where the hell you are. Come out and meet your betters,” Ben called with gruff good humor.
Chuckles from Sheppard and Weston, and more of that rocking motion from Black Stealth One. Ben led them nearer with, “You see how a man’s weight affects it; you won’t believe it but this bird weighs under five hundred pounds empty.”
Over someone’s soft whistle he said, “And her radar cross-section is just about nonexistent, God’s truth.”
“Similar to the B-2?”
“The stealth bomber is low observable,” Ben agreed, “but its signature is the size of a hawk’s. The hellbug? More like a hummingbird. We’re talking nonobservable here. Structure’s almost entirely kapton, carbon, and polymer, which damn near floats, and the rotary engine’s mostly ceramic. Even the nuts and bolts are polymers loaded with quartz filament. We’ve only got test-hop tanks in her so far, but her wings are thick enough to carry fuel for four thousand miles. They wouldn’t be tanks, exactly; we call it ‘wet wings.’”
“How long would it take to install wet wings, Ben?” Sheppard’s gaze held the same keen interest that Randolph’s had.
“Couple of months. Have to move her upstairs into Blue Hangar for that. She can’t vertol with that much fuel, though. She’d need a short run, maybe a hundred feet. Medina’s logged about ten hours of test flights.”
“Nobody mentioned that,” Weston blurted. “This thing can take off vertically?”
“And land the same way.” Ben Ullmer squatted at the sleek nose of the craft, tapping a rounded opening beneath, the diameter of a basketball and thin as stovepipe. “This is an exhaust for the diverter waste gates. Another one under each wing. When you swap an external propeller for an impeller inside the airplane, and bolt it to a couple of hundred horsepower, you get a ducted fan that’ll pump air like God’s own vacuum cleaner. When you deflect the exhaust through these big suckers, the whole airchine will rise straight up.”
“That, I must see,” said Dar Weston, risking the knees of a five-hundred-dollar suit as he knelt. Then, perceiving that a man’s head had just popped from a hatch where the wing joined that yawning duct, the CIA man chuckled. “Well, hello there.” He turned back to Ben. “What else will this bird do that the others won’t?”
Ullmer watched as the man eased himself from the hatch, a sweat-covered wiry fellow wearing spotless coveralls and cloth gloves, with the dark eyes and blue-black hair of a latino. Fine squint lines hinted that the man was older than he at first looked. Ben introduced the visitors to Raoul Medina.
“You flew for us awhile,” said Randolph when Medina had emerged barefooted to sit on a protective pad. “I believe you have a jockstrap medal back at Langley.” CIA men joked that Company medals could be worn only on your jockstrap, and the medals rarely left Company headquarters at Langley, Virginia.
“Yessir,” Medina agreed, smiling, wiping sweat from his face, moving from the wing root to a nearby inspection stand. “Before you were DCI.”
“Some passes in a U-2R over ‘Nam and China, against stuff that might’ve brought you down,” Randolph persisted.
“Yessir,” Medina repeated, the smile unchanged as he folded the blanket-sized pad.
“But it didn’t, and here you are with NSA,” Randolph said, smiling back, supplying words for a man who seemed to lack them.
“That was then. This is now,” said Raoul Medina, with an easy candor that avoided insolence by a millimeter. He began to position the hatch cover with loving care. As if to atone for his earlier brevity, Medina kissed his fingertips and placed them on the wing. “And this, as they say, is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. She’s a handful when hovering but compared to anything else that hovers, she’s quiet as mice.”
“How many people can fly it?”
“Only him, so far,” Ben Ullmer put in. “Raoul got his A and P ticket after he left you. Pilot first, master mechanic second. A lot of Black Stealth One is his doing; his and Corbett’s.”
“That means you must’ve designed it before, um, ‘eighty-five,” Weston mused.
“Right,” said Ben. “You have to quit changing and start building at some point, or you’d never finish.” Medina studied the CIA man for a moment, but said nothing. Ben went on, “I s’pose you folks want to see what else the hellbug can do. You won’t believe it unless you see it. Raouclass="underline" need a preflight?”
Medina shook his head. “What’s the drill?” Pulling the gloves off with his teeth, he tugged at a flush latch below the creature’s bulging left eye, which raised in gullwing fashion for his entry. He shoved his toes into a spring-loaded niche to step up. Again, the entire aircraft flexed as if shrugging. Medina snapped a five-element harness, flicking switches, scanning dials.
“Make a circuit around us at five meters. Then back off near the wall and go to chameleon mode. Set her down in her plumage.” Ben was almost smiling, an expression he had never shown to Aldrich before.
Medina nodded and latched the canopy. Ben Ullmer led the way back to the wall where they had entered, said, “Might get a little breezy in here,” folded his arms and waited.
A faint smoky chuffing from the exhaust vent caused the craft to shake perceptibly for a moment, but as the engine’s whirr sped up, the shaking ceased and the smoke disappeared. Ben said to Weston, who stood next to him, “You asked what she’ll do that the others won’t? Well, we pass the engine exhaust through finned mufflers behind the impeller blades; no IR signature because the exhaust jet is just cool air. And all hovercraft make a hell of a racket. Except this one.” Now, Ben was definitely smiling.
“No louder than a stiff breeze,” Weston noted.
The engine noise was not even as loud as that multiblade impeller, whirling inside the duct, gulping air around the pod and flinging it out behind. A man did not have to shout to be heard. “Don’t impeller blades return a radar signal?”
“Not if they’re plastic,” Ben replied. “And blades are way up inside the inlet duct; adds to the muffler effect.”
As he spoke, the hollow rush of air took on a different note, the wings rising almost as if to flap. “Diverters working for vertol,” Ben said. And then Black Stealth One was rising steadily on three invisible columns of air.
The watchers blinked away dust motes in the breeze that eddied around them, and when its skids were fifteen feet above the concrete the whole aircraft began to pivot. Ullmer shook his fist. The pivot motion stopped and Medina backed the ship away. “Just tellin’ Medina what he’d get if he gave us a zap of exhaust. Blow us all flat. You want to watch his sense of humor, gents.” But Medina had manipulated the craft so that it now floated near one back wall of the hangar. He lifted its nose slightly and began to parallel the wall. Backward.
“This is absolutely staggering,” said Randolph, watching Black Stealth One as it began to parallel another wall.
After his path had described a “U” pattern, Medina moved the craft as far from them as possible. “Watch,” said Ben Ullmer.
“Jeeesus Christ,” said the Director of Central Intelligence.
The aircraft, in an instant, seemed to become transparent and virtually disappeared. Where the background was cream-tinted wall, the skin of Black Stealth One was cream. A hangar air duct, blocked by the wing, suddenly appeared to be visible through the wing. Even the vertical wall seams were reproduced, but with the faithfulness of a wayward lover, not quite perfect. The canopy, however, remained a canopy and the fidelity of the illusion was not exact for anyone but Foy, whom Medina had evidently chosen as the focus.