She pulled power and held her speed constant until she had assured herself the plane wouldn’t nose-dive for the ground. Then she cracked the power back even further.
Sixty-five knots, she thought, then added a second notch of flaps as her airspeed crept closer to the final approach speed.
Fifty-five knots.
“You need to put her down,” the helicopter pilot said. “Now.”
Forty-five knots. She reached up for the flap lever one last time and added a final notch, then established the proper attitude for a wheel landing.
She rounded out the bottom of the approach profile, and the tremor grew until the plane shook with surprising intensity. She waggled her stick from side to side, dumping air and lift from under the wings until the tundra tires settled onto the dirt. Not knowing how badly her tailwheel was damaged, she kept it off the ground and tracked in a straight line, using gentle rudder pedal inputs to avoid the biggest shrubs dotting her path.
“Stop!” the voice screamed at her.
As her airspeed continued to decay, she retracted her flaps and let the tailwheel fall as her landing lights illuminated what looked like the end of the earth racing toward her. She stood on the brake pedals and held her breath as the experimental plane struggled to stop before she ran out of ground.
When the Carbon Cub came to rest at last, she felt the tension trapped in her body evaporate in an instant.
Jug leaned his helmet against the head box as he plugged in the afterburner and watched his airspeed tick upward in his Helmet Mounted Display. He added back pressure to his side stick, and the Joint Strike Fighter climbed rapidly through the thin coastal air.
“Devil One climbing into the three block,” he said over the datalink network, letting the test director back in China Lake know he was climbing to thirty thousand feet to begin the test.
“Copy,” the emotionless voice replied.
It felt strange being the only aircraft in the large Pacific missile test complex, but at least he had a host of engineers, technicians, and other test pilots monitoring his flight from the command center back in China Lake. If he needed a second or third set of eyes and ears, he would have his pick.
He pulled the engine out of afterburner and climbed effortlessly at three hundred and fifty knots. With a subtle twitch of his hand, the plane responded to his command and banked to the right as he steered to follow the pre-programmed route on his display.
A little over a minute later, he flew over the first fix on his route. “Devil One, checkpoint Alpha,” he said.
“Copy,” the same emotionless voice answered.
He adjusted his heading to the southwest on a route that took him just north of San Nicolas Island, where the Navy had a myriad of radar emitters that would attempt to detect him while he engaged target drones orbiting in a simulated CAP.
His radar warning receiver chirped, and Jug noted the line of bearing from the emitter, figuring it was one of the Navy’s longer-range systems. But so far, the ground-based system had not painted a return, and he was still piloting a phantom through the night sky. But he wasn’t willing to risk Project Rán’s success on chance, so he toggled over on the Panoramic Cockpit Display to the page for the AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare suite.
The next-generation electronic warfare suite was always active and provided both offensive and defensive options to the pilot. But it was its all-aspect, broadband protection and suppression of enemy radars that Jug was most interested in. Even if a surveillance radar was able to paint a return against the radar-absorbent material baked into the skin of his jet, his EW system would jam it and create a blind spot for him to slip through. He grinned when he saw the system working as advertised.
“Devil One, buzzer on,” he said, letting the observers in the command center know he was jamming along a radar’s line of bearing.
“Copy, Devil One,” the observer said. “Palmdale, how’s the radar picture?”
The voice of their FAA representative broke in. “Picture clean.”
“Devil One, continue to checkpoint Bravo.”
“Roger,” Jug said.
He scaled out on his moving map display to see more of the route that turned north after San Nicolas and paralleled the Air Defense Identification Zone at the far western edge of the test complex. He knew he would engage the target drones on that leg before reversing course to the south to launch his Joint Strike Missiles at the target ship.
Fighting off the temptation to relax and let his guard down, he pulled up his fuel system’s display and compared his current fuel state with the plan. No matter how successful the test went, if he didn’t have enough gas to make it back to base, that failure would overshadow everything else.
“Looking good,” he said to himself. But any additional commentary was cut short when his display flickered. “What the…”
He half expected the oddity to be accompanied by a caution, warning of an impending electrical failure. But the flicker lasted less than a second and the display returned to normal, leaving him with only a slightly uneasy feeling that things weren’t as kosher as they seemed. He had almost successfully brushed the incident under the rug of other more pressing matters when he remembered what Colt had told him earlier.
He switched off datalink comms to the frequency for the radio they had set up in the ready room back in Point Mugu. “Base, Devil One, is Lieutenant Bancroft around?”
“Wait one.”
He knew Colt was focused on getting results back from China Lake, but he didn’t think the TOPGUN instructor would be far from the radio where he could monitor the test. Even though he was certain he was letting his imagination get the better of him, he couldn’t just dismiss the anomaly as a one-off gremlin that all newer fighters experienced.
“Devil One, he’s not in the room at the moment.”
He shrugged and decided to let it go in favor of focusing on the task at hand. He made a mental note to include the flickering displays in his report and reached up to the touchscreen display to select his weapons page. The screen flickered again, then shuffled through several pages on its own, causing his stomach to drop with a sudden onset of fear.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Jug, this is Colt.”
Jug exhaled loudly, then keyed the button to transmit his reply. “Colt, something strange is going on.”
“Abort the mission and return to base.”
He recoiled as if slapped. “Say that again?”
“I said abort… abort the mission and return to base. Punky is taking fire over Santa Cruz Island, and I’m en route to provide air cover.”
He didn’t have a clue what was going on but didn’t argue and pressed the button to disengage the autopilot, uncoupling the jet from the pre-programmed route. Then he added pressure to the side stick to turn his jet back to the east and the safety of Point Mugu. The test could wait.
But his wings remained level with his nose pointed at the dark mass of San Nicolas Island.
Oh, shit…
“Jug?”
The moisture in his mouth evaporated in an instant, and his tongue felt thick as he tried to speak. “Colt…” He paused. “I can’t…”
“You have to!”
“You don’t understand,” he replied, awash with fear. “I can’t control it.”
41
Captain Bethany Lewis jerked upright with a start, her eyes wide with fright and staring into the darkness as she struggled to surface from her nightmare. The blue wool blanket was a little thinner than it had been when they issued it to her as a Plebe at the Naval Academy, but she tossed the “blue magnet” aside and swung her feet out onto the floor. Using the heels of her hands, she massaged away the fatigue from her eyes before glancing at the boxy battery-powered alarm clock on her desk.