Jack Du Brul - Deep Fire Rising

The jagged winged aircraft was drawn from its revetment and pulled to a parking slot adjacent to the main runway. A ground crewman unhitched the tow tractor, snapped the pilot a crisp salute and motored away.

Deep in the B-2’s hull the first engine spun to life, followed seconds later by the other three. Although the powerful turbofans straddled the bomb bay, the noise level inside the soundproofed MMU was only slightly louder than what passengers experienced on an airliner.

The pilot performed one final test of the aircraft’s complicated control surfaces. Satisfied, he ran up the engines and the menacing plane began to roll under its own power.

In front of the aircraft, the end of the runway vanished in the wavering curtains of a heat mirage. Behind the plane, hot exhaust created the same effect so the bomber looked like a wraith enveloped in a chimera. Even on the ground the B-2 was otherworldly, like no aircraft ever built.

The engines’ roar turned into a scream as the Spirit picked up speed. Using less than a third of the runway, the B-2’s nose lifted and she took to the sky. The landing gear snapped closed as the bomber began climbing for the safety of the upper troposphere, high above commercial traffic.

From inside the bomb bay, the ascent felt smooth. The men made a few bad jokes and bantered for a while, but soon grew quiet as they settled in for the six hours of being locked in the MMUs with their thoughts and fears. After a while Mercer was able to forget where he was and what they were about to attempt. His mind drifted through countless random thoughts, and while he knew he should be thinking about the impending eruption on La Palma, he found himself focusing on Tisa.

Just one day and night with her had created a deeper impression on him than any woman he’d ever been with. He sought justifications and rationales for his thoughts and admitted that this wasn’t something he had conscious control over. He’d strayed from the path of what was logical and crossed into an emotional realm he seldom approached. The answer to the fundamental question of if he loved her wasn’t clear yet, but he did face the truth that he wanted to.

Mercer had earned the reputation as one of the best mining engineers and prospecting geologists in the world by making deliberate calculations and expertly assessing risk versus reward. Like so many other driven men he’d used those same analytical skills on his personal life as well. The result was a string of short but intense relationships that he ultimately cut short. The reasons were varied but underlying all the breakups was his belief that the affair would ultimately fail anyway and it was better for the women to have it end quickly. For the first time he got a sense that it was his own fear of getting hurt that made him end those other relationships. He wasn’t doing it to protect the women. He was doing it to protect himself. By breaking up quickly, he shielded himself from the risk of possible rejection and the associated doubts that came with it.

“Goddamned strange place for an epiphany,” he muttered as the plane streaked across the Indian Ocean.

And also for the first time, he believed in risking that kind of pain for the opportunity to be with Tisa. He had always been comfortable gambling with his life. That was part of any miner’s job. Now he was growing comfortable with risking his lifestyle too. He drifted to sleep with that thought foremost in his mind.

Hours later, the internal intercom squawked to life. “Gentlemen, this is the flight deck. We’re about an hour from the border with Tibet. Not that we expected they would, but Indian civilian and military radars have failed to pick us up. However we’re approaching the Chinese air defense net. Once we get closer to the border we’ll be dropping to the deck and may be forced to find a route where their radar coverage is thinnest. There’s nothing to worry about, but you guys may get tossed around down there.” He clicked off, returned a second later, and quipped, “Oh, and depending on conditions we might have to dodge a mountain or two.”

The strategic bomber’s flight path had kept it over the ocean for as long as possible, allowing her to top her tanks with an aerial refueling from a KC-10 tanker over the Arabian Sea. The plane made landfall north of Bombay and headed in a northwesterly diagonal across India toward Nepal. Cruising at forty-five thousand feet, too high for anyone on the ground to see or hear, the B-2 still skirted all the major population centers as extra insurance.

Now that they were nearing the Himalayan foothills it was time to drop closer to the ground and employ the aircraft’s sophisticated terrain following/terrain avoidance (TA/FA) system. One of the one hundred sixty-two onboard computers would take control of the plane, mapping out and following a route through the mountains while at the same time keeping clear of Chinese radar installations. Even though the stealth’s shape and skin gave it the radar cross section of a bird, the classified radar-detection system made certain that even that small of a picture wouldn’t appear on an enemy’s scopes.

The final piece of stealth gear to be employed was perhaps the most classified on the aircraft. Because of its unusual shape and mission needs, the B-2 flew below the speed of sound. Had it been able to travel faster than the thunder of its own engines, like the B-1b Lancer, acoustical detection wouldn’t have been a concern. Even with the engines shielded within the hull to deaden some sound, the Spirit flew within an envelope of noise generated by its four turbofans and could be heard coming miles off at low level. To counter this, the design team created an antinoise generator, a device that matched the frequency of the sound waves and produced waves of its own at the exact opposite amplitude. While consuming an enormous amount of fuel, the top secret apparatus effectively canceled out the jet’s bellowing roar. With the device in operation and at five hundred knots, the B-2 sounded barely louder than a well-tuned Harley-Davidson.

The Himalayan massif quickly came into range. The barometric altimeter showed fifteen thousand feet, but the plane was only a thousand above the ground. Trained for this kind of flying, the pilots were relaxed in their seats as the sophisticated controls moved of their own accord. The Spirit followed the path mapped by its GPS and radar, rocketing through steep valleys, slewing around ramparts that towered ten thousand feet above the bat-winged plane. It was a ride on the ultimate roller coaster, one in which the car determined where to put the tracks it was to follow.

The plane ate the distance across Nepal in twenty minutes and was a dozen miles from the Chinese border when the computer detected the first antiaircraft radar. In minutes a CRT screen in the cockpit lit up with dozens of radar contacts. The coverage appeared solid, a veritable minefield stretching the length of the frontier and projecting fifty miles into the country. Added to this was the presence of microwave towers built intentionally to detect a stealth bomber penetration. The towers emitted an invisible barrier of energy that the plane would have to fly through.

The idea behind the barrage of microwaves wasn’t to find the plane directly but rather to detect the hole it created when it cut across the net, much the same as sonar operators focus on quiet spots in the otherwise noisy seas to find modern noiseless submarines. Detractors of the B-2 had called this low-tech solution reason enough to scrap the $2 billion planes.

The veteran pilot watched the terrain map unfolding on the screen in front of him, trying to guess their route before the computer found it. There were several radars in the H and E bands to their west and a powerful microwave tower directly ahead. The tower appeared to be on a mountaintop. The computer banked the bomber so it steered close to the tower but a thousand feet below it in a valley only five hundred feet wider than the plane’s 172-foot wingspan. The pilot would have made the same maneuvers, although his solution came seconds after the computer’s.