Edward Lee - Operator B

“Stop it! Stop it! I’m going to—”

Wentz leveled off with a single quick jerk of the stick. In one second, the plane was flying flat and smooth, roaring westward, the sun beaming above the sky.

He could hear Ashton gasping in his commo set. “You okay, Colonel?”

A few more gasps, then the otherwise reserved Colonel Ashton shouted, “Look, I’m not into this fighter-jock macho crap, damn you! Fly the plane normal!”

“I thought that’s what I was doing,” Wentz miked back to her. “Tighten your stomach muscles. I’ll show you normal.” More finesse on the stick, and the plane’s wings were perpendicular to the earth as he pulled into a 4-G climb.

“Stop it! Stop it!” she shrieked. “Please!”

Guess it’s time to stop being a dickhead, Wentz considered. He leveled off again. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I just thought you’d want to experience an official takeoff record. We just climbed to 58,000 feet in one minute. That’s a record for this aircraft. Now you’ve got something to tell your grandkids.”

Ashton sat behind Wentz, in what would otherwise be the Bear’s Seat, or the EWO seat—electronic warfare officer. This F-15M2-series was a courier version: minimal AV bay, no ECM pod, no General Electric M61 gun. It was stripped, in other words, all business. Two seats sitting on top of two modified Pratt-Whitney dual-shaft turbofans rated 40,000 pounds of zero-mean thrust apiece. The fuel-burn-rating was classified, and so was the plane’s top speed: mach three-point-one. The only thing that struck him as odd was the paint scheme: flat Khaki paint, solid, like the color of sand.

“I almost… peed myself!” Ashton shouted through her mike. “I don’t care if you’re the best pilot in the world! Don’t do anymore of that shit!”

Wentz winced at the word. “Colonel? If I may make a personal observation? Somehow, hearing the word shit come out of your mouth…well, it doesn’t become you.”

“Fuck off!”

Neither does that, Wentz thought. “I apologize, Colonel. I’m just having a little last-minute fun. After tomorrow, I’ll never be flying this fast again.”

An exhalation over the wire somehow sounded coy. “Still don’t think you’ll take the mission?”

“Positive. Rainier was playing me for a fool, so I thought I’d return the favor. Thought I’d take the opportunity to drive an Eagle one more time, at his expense. Whatever this mission is, I ain’t taking it.”

The coyness left her voice. Now she sounded dead serious. “Don’t be too sure.”

Wentz cut his afterburners when the temp needle was about to max. “All right, let’s forget about keeping a jackass in suspense. Tell me the mission.”

“No way, sir. You need to see for yourself, just like General Rainier said.”

“Eee-haw, eee-haw,” Wentz said. “And by the way, what’s with the funky paint on the plane?”

“You’ll see.”

Great answer. “Okay, but if you don’t mind my asking, what’s an… attractive… woman like you doing in all this super-secret classified security clearance bullshit?”

“You know something, General? Even Farrington wasn’t as sexist as you.”

“Sexist!” Wentz objected. “Where’d that come from?”

“Most of you guys? Jesus. Because you’re so maladjusted and unsocialized, you pull these macho big-stud pilot antics. You think that turns a woman on. You think women melt when they see a hardline test pilot in uniform. Well, let me tell you something, General. I’ve met a lot of pilots in this business, and every single one of them has been an egotistical self-absorbed high-on-himself asshole. ”

Wentz chuckled. “Then I’m glad I haven’t disappointed you, Colonel.”

“Boxcars One, this is Romeo One. Do you read?”

“Roger,” Wentz answered. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem, Boxcars One. We just wanted to let you know that our planar-array WLR confirms that you just set an official climb record for an aircraft of your designated thrust-rating.”

“Roger, Romeo One. Tell me something I don’t already know. Boxcars One, out.” Wentz smiled. “See?” he miked back to Ashton. “I told you.”

“I’m not terribly impressed, General,” Ashton shot back. “And what’s with the ‘Boxcars?’ Isn’t that a symbol of ill omen?”

“Sure,” Wentz said. “Every time I land a plane, I expect to die, and I always pick a call-sign that’s bad luck. Widow-maker, Plane Thirteen, Lockheed Casket Company, stuff like that. When I flew the Aurora, my call-sign was Dead Man One. It appeases the fates. It nullifies bad luck by giving reverence to it—it’s pilot stuff. We call it The Nix. If you don’t worship The Nix…you’re spam in a can. There won’t be enough left of you for an E-2 crash technician to scrape out of the cockpit with a spatula.”

“The Nix, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Another coy silence, then Ashton’s voice lowered. “You might need a lot more than The Nix to save you now.”

“Think so? We’ll see. I already told you, I’m not taking the mission, whatever it is.”

Silence.

Then, “Oh, you’ll take it, General,” Ashton said. “I guarantee you’ll take it.”

Wentz laughed out lout in his mask. “Keep dreaming, lady! I’m just here for the stick time…”

««—»»

Fifteen minutes later, Wentz keyed his mike. “We’re coming up.”

“All right, General,” Ashton replied. “Slight change of destination. We’re not really going to Nellis.”

“What? So where are we going? Tasty-Freeze?”

“Proceed past Nellis Main Runway 3 to Papoose Lake, seventy-five miles west, southwest.”

Alarmed, Wentz jerked his head around to look at her. “Papoose Lake? That’s a priority no-fly perimeter! I can’t land there!”

Ashton passed forward another plastic envelope. Wentz tore it open and removed a card that read:

4B6: PILOT - (SI) TEKNA/BYMAN/ULTIMA

- COMMAND ORDER -

BYPASS AS INSTRUCTED.

Wentz just shook his head, adjusting the pitch-trim. “Whatever you say, lady.” He kept one eye on the E-scope, then he veered the stick and peeled off toward the new coordinates. The spookshow continues, he thought. Papoose was a lake that had dried up hundreds of years ago, and since Wentz’s first day as a pilot, any aerial passage over the ten-thousand-acre perimeter was strictly prohibited by the FAA, the Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Air Force Security Group Activity. No one knew why but it was easy to guess. A dried-up lake? Thousands of acres of desert? Irradiated waste disposal, or a chemical/biological dump, Wentz presumed.

Below him, the desert stretched endlessly, humped by ridges of sand dunes. “So where am I going to land?” he asked Ashton. “On the sand dunes?”

“There’s a runway. You just can’t see it.”

“What?”

“Switch on your inertial-navigation director and turn your automatic blue-flight toggle to ‘alt.’ Set your heading to four-three-one, then activate auto-pilot.”

Smirking, Wentz did as instructed.

“Now turn on your ECM jammer pod—”

“This is a courier! There’s no ECM on this plane!” Wentz barked.

“No, but there’s something else connected to its console.”

Dismayed, Wentz flipped up the ENABLE switch. Suddenly the sky-toe display snapped on, and—

What the—

—the aircraft began to descend, pivot, and maneuver for landing, all without Wentz doing a thing. Of course, auto-landers existed but were rarely used, and even when they were, it was always necessary for the pilot to visually line up a computer mark with the landing zone.