“The best,” Corbett replied, checking his fuel counter and wristwatch. “It’s working.” He took a bite of cheese and a swallow of water, then handed the water bottle back. He noticed that Petra no longer bothered to drink from a separate container; one of many signs that both warmed and disturbed him. “If you’re through, stow all that stuff. I really hate a messy cockpit.”
“If that’s a straight line, I think I’ll leave it alone,” she said with a smile, and repacked their food before zipping his leather bag. She sucked her fingers before setting the IR scanner for a complete sweep. “I still don’t understand why we’re practically kissing the water or why it’s working. Something I’m not supposed to know?”
“Nope. There are two advantages to skimming the waves, Petra. One, it defeats even the kinds of radar that might pick the hellbug up, if I remember correctly. But better still, it lets us use ground effect.”
“Show me some ground, Kyle. All I see is water.”
“It works with water, too; over any flat surface, you can save a hell of a lot of fuel by skimming. It’s called ‘ground effect’; when the air’s caught between the wing and the ground surface, the wing gets extra lift. The closer the better; right now I’m throttled back so much we’re stretching our fuel nearly thirty percent. That’s an extra hundred and fifty miles for us.”
“Then we won’t even have to stop for fuel in Louisiuh-oh,” she broke off, swinging the video monitor to give Corbett a better view. She keyed the scanner again. “I’m locking onto that guy. Okay?”
“Yep, paint us for him.” Corbett studied the fast-approaching blip and saw another faint blip approach on the same course, a few miles from the first. He had swung the hellbug’s nose a few points southward to avoid the Louisiana coastline entirely. The infrared scanner proved that this region of coastline, beyond their horizon only because they flitted so near the water, was thickly patrolled. Almost as if they knew where I’d intended to refuel. Sure, Ullmer would know what I’ve got to do; the old fart may have guessed what I’m doing now, but he can’t know which directioncan he?
Switching among military radio frequencies, he divided his attention between the crosstalk of pilots and those blips approaching at ten thousand feet, one of them nearly overhead by now. It might be any of several twin-engined types, though the radio messages seemed to emanate from many aircraft. “… a roger, Poker Three, turning on eastern leg at three-zero thousand …” No problem there; probably a flight of Air Force interceptors much too high to worry about. Then, “Red leader, try Bravo channel,” said a voice on another channel, so Corbett tried it too.
“…shadow on the water,” said a youthful male voice which Corbett recognized, “at your two o’clock low. It does cast a shadow, right?”
“Roger, Cyclops Two,” Ben Ullmer’s voice assured. “We get nothing on the scopes yet, and no visuals. He could be locking onto us. We’ll orbit at this altitude; you might sortie down for a better look.”
Corbett could see them clearly, two dark silhouettes at ten thousand feet, too low to have contrails, too slow for jets. As he watched, the most distant aircraft began to drop from the sky and he decided it must be a P2V, maybe one of the Cyclops team carrying Weston and Ullmer. “Bandit at four o’clock high, Petra, ah, over your right shoulder. I’m going for a tight pullup. You’ve got two blips; lock onto the other one but wait ‘til I tell you. And tighten your harness.”
Through the clear polymer bubble over his head, Corbett studied the unlovely lines of the P2V as it passed almost directly above. Visual sightings were always a problem directly below most aircraft, and Corbett firewalled his throttle to gain maximum level speed before he urged Black Stealth One into an abrupt climb, then turned to follow the wind. “Lock onto the other one now,” he said calmly.
And grinned to himself as he heard, “…steep climb, banking toward me. Hell’s fire, he’s disappeared! Shadow’s still there; ready munitions,” said the young commander with grim self-assurance.
For a moment, Corbett did not recognize the voice of Dar Weston. “Cyclops Two, wait for us to…”
“Munitions away,” said the pilot, barreling along at over three hundred miles an hour, flashing across the sky a thousand feet above and ahead of Black Stealth One. Corbett knew then that he had grinned too soon.
He had never even wondered how the hellbug would respond to full power to the waste gates while engaged in an inside loop, and he did not think about it as he tried it; the long string of dots that appeared from the Neptune’s belly were already becoming a train of tiny parachutes as Black Stealth One responded, the combination of forward speed and diverted thrust hauling the craft up and over within a few hundred feet, now upside down as Corbett released the waste gates. He felt the drag of inertia on his body, judging that the aircraft was straining under a four-G load, instinctively aware that he must cut back on power and roll the hellbug out of this inverted position.
His rollout completed a classic “Immelmann,” half of a loop followed by a half roll. Petra yelped as loose hardware bounced off the canopy, the leather bag landing in her lap. Corbett found the siphon hose draped across his shoulder and shoved it aside, guiding the hellbug into a downward sideslip to gain more distance from those weighted parachutes.
At the end of the maneuver, Black Stealth One was again skimming near the waves while, a hundred yards to the right, a long train of munitions began to explode as each “buckshot” pod neared the water. Several of the explosions were deafeningly near. Corbett, accelerating again, kept waiting for the sizzle and thump that would tell him a hunk of shrapnel had struck the hellbug, unaware that buckshot munitions had been designed to hurl all their slugs downward in a lethal conic spray.
As the voices in his minitel generated a kind of chaos, Corbett glanced at his passenger. “You okay?”
“A shame to lose my lunch,” she said, pale and gasping, as she shoved the leather bag behind her knees.
“Can you still work the pixel program?”
“I can try,” she said, struggling to sit straighter.
“Those fuckers are chasing our shadow; we can’t paint that, but we can sure hide it if we get low enough,” he said, watching the two Neptunes as they circled with the obvious intention of a return pass. He banked again, moving with the wind
and with the ranks of whitecaps. “Now, do what we tried yesterday, to fool something infinitely high,” he said. “There’s no real bogey to lock on to”
“Right, right,” she said, her fingers racing. Then she sat back, still taking long breaths to quell her nausea. “Now tell me whyand I hope you can see that damned airplane coming at us again on your left front.”
“My ten o’clock,” he nodded, throttling back. “I see him, but if he sees us we’re in deep shit. Listen, uhnow that it’s empty, the plastic fuel bag will keep you afloat a long time. We’re about thirty miles south of land but we’re headed northwest toward it. If you’re not used to keeping your bearings by the sun’s position, better start now.”
“What are you saying?” Her voice was very small.
“Just in case we wind up in the water,” he said, staring at the aircraft that approached, slowly now, so slowly that its big wing flaps slanted down as if for landing. “Now hush so I can hear what they’re up to.” He slowed as much as he dared, using the waste gates to hover at the same pace as the wavetops, now so near the waters of the Gulf that he expected to feel the slap of salt water against the fuselage.