Mack Maloney: Chopper Ops

Black truck. Black windows. Even the tire rims were painted black. Norton had seen such vehicles before.

Spooks? he thought. Here to see the show?

That seemed unlikely.

The two men were walking towards him before he reached the bottom of the ladder. They were both wearing brand-new jeans, Western-style white shirts, black boots, and baseball caps.

Yep, Norton thought. These guys were definitely Spooks.

They always dressed the same.

He met the pair at the bottom of the ladder. Neither one struck him as someone who had seen any military service.

“Enjoy the show?” he asked them good-naturedly.

Both men ignored the question.

“You Norton?” one asked instead.

Norton yanked off his helmet and smoothed back his ruffled hair. “I am,” he replied.

Both men flashed their ID badges. Norton thought he saw something like CIA-DIS. Or was it NSA-CIS? He didn’t know, and in the end, it didn’t make much difference. They were just Spooks.

“We have to have a little talk,” the first man told Norton.

Norton shrugged. “Here? Now?”

“Here, now,” the second guy said.

Norton now gave them a good once-over. What would these two want with him? He had already tip-top security clearance; it was a requirement for his job. Then it hit him: They were here to clear him for his long-pending job at Area 51.

What else could it be?

“OK, then,” he said. “Talk…”

“Where did you learn to fly like that?” the first Spook asked.

Norton just shrugged again. “It comes naturally,” he said, adding with a pause, “After about five thousand hours in the air.”

“You can fly anything with your eyes closed,” the second guy said. “Day or night. Through unfriendly skies. That’s what we heard.”

“Yeah? Who told you that?” Norton asked.

The Spooks ignored this question as well and moved in a little closer. The first guy lowered his voice.

“Look, we’ve got a question to ask you,” he began. “Now we don’t know whether you like this traveling-carnival thing or not. But depending on your answer, you can be out of this three-ring circus and into something very heavy inside a minute.”

“I’m listening,” Norton replied. “Ask away.”

The first Spook took a deep breath.

“Ever fly a helicopter?” he asked.

St. Louis International Airport

One week later

The airport had been closed for two hours.

All scheduled flights had been notified of the shutdown days in advance. Many had been canceled or diverted to other airports nearby.

Roads leading in and out of the sprawling airport had been blocked off for ninety minutes. Dozens of St. Louis city policemen were manning these detours, miserable in a driving rain. Closer in to the airport itself, the secondary terminals as well as all the parking lots were being guarded by Missouri state troopers. The main terminal itself was crawling with Secret Service. By 1625 hours—4:25 in the afternoon on this dreary day—everything was set.

The President’s plane arrived on schedule, exactly five minutes later.

Air Force One landed smoothly, its wheels hitting the rain-swept runway with hardly any skidding. The pilots immediately threw the engines into reverse, and the huge airplane began slowing down. It was met at the far end of the runway by a caravan of security trucks. One had its four-way flashes blinking; it began moving towards the main terminal. The giant Presidential 747 slowly followed.

The heavy rain had forced a small greeting ceremony indoors. Some five hundred people—political types and their families mostly—were now crammed into one corner of the terminal, separated from the unloading ramp by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Relegated to the far corner of the terminal building was a tight knot of media types. TV and newspaper people, they’d spent the afternoon grumbling about the poor position so hastily assigned to them.

Air Force One finally jolted to a stop in front of the terminal platform. Outside, the rain came harder and the wind more fierce. A small army of aides burst from the airplane’s main door and trooped down the ramp-way. Finally the President himself emerged. He walked into the terminal building, waved to the assembled locals, posed for a picture with an elderly supporter, and then was whisked away. Down the causeway and out to the rainy street, where he was put into a pre-positioned limousine, which roared off behind a huge motorcycle escort. A fund-raising speech in downtown St. Louis awaited him.

Two minutes after the Presidential plane touched down, a similar-looking 747 landed. This plane was painted in standard Air Force gray. Its radio call sign was “Phone Booth.” It was crammed with sophisticated communications and emergency medical equipment, including a fully equipped mobile surgical room. This plane’s passenger hold was also carrying two Presidential security doubles, a gaggle of mid-level Presidential aides, and a handful of reporters.

Five minutes after that, an Air Force C-141 Starlifter landed. Painted white and converted into a passenger carrier, this plane was hauling, among other things, a backup team of Secret Service agents and a dozen low-level White House staff members. It joined “Phone Booth” at the end of the runway, and together they taxied to a spot about one hundred yards away from where Air Force One was parked.

Twenty minutes after this, another airplane entered the St. Louis landing pattern. This aircraft was a noisy, smoky, thirty-five-year-old C-130 Hercules cargo plane. It was painted in faded green camouflage, and the plane’s propeller engines were extremely loud in comparison to the relatively quiet jets that had landed before it. In the airborne Presidential entourage, this C-130 was the runt, the caboose. The Number 4. Its cargo hold held nothing more exotic than a pair of backup Presidential limousines, some Presidential suitcases, and the various pets of the Presidential entourage.

No surprise its radio call sign was “Doghouse.”

The pilot of this aircraft was Major Bobby Delaney. Mid-thirties, narrow but solidly built, with a shock of rusty hair, he’d been in the Air Force fifteen years, the last eighteen months of which he’d spent flying the Doghouse.

Earlier in his career, he’d drawn some good duty, including a DFC for his performance flying F-15’s during the Gulf War. But since that time, he’d watched many of his colleagues leave the military to take jobs with the airlines or driving private business jets. Many were now making over six figures in salary.

Delaney hated his present job, and not just because of the shitty service pay he was drawing. This duty was long days and long nights, with many hours of boredom in between. Not two months into his assignment, he’d made an informal request to be re-designated. But his superiors had informed him that resigning Presidential duty so early would be considered extremely imprudent.

So Delaney was stuck, for at least another eighteen months anyway, hauling around two bulletproof cars and a half-dozen poodles and cats. He was serving his country by flying what was essentially a cross between an airborne tow truck and a kennel.

Next to his divorce eight years before, nothing had been quite so miserable.

The flight to St. Louis had been a routine if bumpy affair.

A storm system over southern Ohio had forced a fifty-mile diversion over Kentucky. By the time Delaney’s plane entered St. Louis ATC coverage, the three previous airplanes in the Presidential entourage had already been unloaded.

It was dark and raining even harder when Delaney finally landed the four-prop beast on an auxiliary airstrip at the airport. The unloading of the backup limos—always a laborious process—began soon afterwards. A team of Secret Service agents had to inspect each limo before it was unstrapped from its tethers in the back of the airplane. After this, each limo was rolled down the plane’s cargo ramp, then inspected yet again. During all this inspection, Delaney and his four-man crew were required to stay in the C-130’s cramped cockpit, thumbs- in-asses, until the all-clear was given. With the rain and the gathering darkness, this time-intensive drill stretched into two hours, nearly as long as the flight from Andrews Air Force Base had taken in the first place.