Edward Lee - Operator B

But, here, there was no landing zone.

All Wentz could see below him were the endless hillocks of sand.

“It’s some kind of a pulse-navaid, isn’t it?” Wentz asked. “It receives emissions from a ground-based VOR and terrain-following radar, then feeds it all into an onboard processor, right?”

“Do you see any radar antennas or VOR dishes, General?”

Wentz strained his eyes. He saw nothing but sand.

“Besides,” Ashton added over the commo line, “a half-hour from now, you’re not even going to care.”

“Still think I’m taking the mission, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Her presumptuousness continued to amuse him to no end, but as the plane’s altitude began to drop, Wentz’s concern rose. She’d said something about a runway that couldn’t be seen. But where? The dunes?

“Where are we going anyway?”

“A base,” Ashton answered.

Wentz stared down. Only sand dunes.

“I don’t see any damn base—”

Then the landing gear began to lower on its own. The flaps dropped, and power began to retard.

“Relax, General,” Ashton said.

Wentz was not relaxed. He began to fidget. After all these years, he’d forgotten how to be afraid.

But now he was remembering again.

When the altimeter read ninety feet, he did something he hadn’t done in decades: he panicked.

“Something’s wrong! The INS must’ve blown its boards!”

“Relax, General,” Ashton calmly repeated.

“We can’t land in sand! I’m going to punch us out—”

“Do NOT eject!” Ashton shouted. “The runway is camouflaged! Do NOT eject!”

Camou— Wentz grit his teeth, staring at the desertscape before him. The tires chirped when the plane touched down. Wentz expected the nose to pitch; he expected an explosion and summary death…

But the plane landed normally in what appeared to be…sand.

Smooth as silk, he thought. “What, the runway—”

“The runway is made of a sand-colored composite,” Ashton said.

“Yeah, but…you can’t see it.”

“That’s the idea.”

Power dwindled to normal taxi speed.

“Disable your ECM switch and take over,” Ashton instructed. “Taxi ahead at zero-forward degrees and keep your eyes peeled for the ground guide.”

Wentz felt stupid, maladroit. Back at the controls, he peered ahead and eventually spotted a man in sand-colored fatigues beckoning them forward with his hands. “I can barely see the guy!”

“Yes, General, and now it’s probably all starting to make some sense.”

A completely subterranean air base? he wondered. Impossible…

The ground guide shoved out his palms— Stop —then made a cut-throat gesture. Wentz braked and shut down the engines.

“What happens now?” he complained to his passenger. “We go play in the dunes? Build a big sand castle?”

The ground began to shake beneath a deep sonorous hum. Wentz remained dumbfounded. Then the ground beneath them, in a long rectangle, began to lower.

A flight elevator, he realized. Like on a carrier, only this was in the desert, part of the desert.

“An underground site,” he said over his mike.

“Yep. Impossible to detect. A lot of those sand dunes are hangar exits. The base has twelve aircraft lifts, all virtually invisible.”

Wentz had seen a lot of military trickery in his time—rubber submarines in Groton, Connecticut; “pseudopod” LF radar generators that cost $100,000,000 per unit; an entire communications complex in Lincoln, Nebraska, whose sole purpose was to manufacture counterfeit radio traffic—but this took it all. The elevator platform lowered the plane some twenty feet, after which a taxi crew zipped forward from out of the dark. Within thirty seconds, a Cushman electric goat pulled the plane backward, then the elevator rose again and sealed shut. Immediately afterward, another crew of men drove mobile vacuums over the platform grid, sucking up sand.

“Now you see the reason for the khaki paint job?” Ashton asked.

But Wentz was rocked. He popped the canopy, gazing out in questioning belief…or disbelief.

An entire installation beneath the earth. Wentz pulled off his flight helmet and air-mask, disconnected his CVC lines. Unconsciously, he unfastened his safety harness. His eyes felt sewn open as he looked around.

Hooded lights lit corridors of metal and cement which stretched further than he could see.

Droves of Air Force techs in white jumpsuits and white hardhats milled about like ants each with a separate duty.

“Fuckin’-A,” Wentz muttered.

“Come on, General,” Ashton prodded. Techs pushed a wheeled ladder to the cockpit. Wentz and Ashton climbed out and down.

“Group! Heads up!” one of the rankless techs shouted. “Officers on the floorwall!”

Another more authoritative voice bellowed, “Snap to, shit-heads! This ain’t the fuckin’ Army! This is the Air Force! I want you turds standing tall! Colonel Ashton’s just brought a general in here. Show him how it’s done!”

“Group Level One! Atteeeeeen tion!”

Heels snapped in a single echoic CLAP! when the droves of white-suited “ants” came to attention and offered perfect salutes. In similarly perfect unison they shouted, “Good afternoon, sir!”

“What is this, the boys’ fucking choir!” the voice belted out. “This man’s a hero! He’s won medals! He’s risked his life for us! He was taking enemy flak when you all were all playing grab-ass and jerking off in high school! You will show him respect! Now sound off like you’re in the Air Force, not the National Guard!”

“GOOD AFTERNOON, SIR!”

The vocal report resounded like a canon shot. Wentz tremored, lifted an inch off his heels. He just stared at them all with his jaw hanging.

“General?” Ashton reminded.

“Oh…yeah.” He and Ashton returned the salutes.

Wentz, in a stunned moment, held the age-old military gesture. For as far as he could see, men in white jumpsuits stood straight as chess pieces, holding their salutes in dead silence.

“Sir?” Ashton whispered. “Drop your salute and offer a counter salutation.” Oh…yeah. Wentz dropped his right hand and droned, “Uh, carry on men.”

“You heard the General!” returned the bellow. “What the fuck is this, a Navy lunch break? You gonna eat quiche with a napkin in your laps? You gonna sip espresso and talk about art? Back to fuckin’ work, ladies, or I’ll send you all out into the fuckin’ desert and the last trace of all your sorry asses will be little pieces of fingernails in buzzard shit!”

Jeeze, Wentz thought. These guys are hardcore, they’re worse than the Marines. The men instantly returned to their nameless duties as a maintenance crew taxied the plane further away into a service cove.

Wentz’s awe sat on his shoulder like a pet parrot as he followed Ashton down what appeared to be the main access passage for this veritable underground terminal. Luminous taxi lanes branched out from various angles, each ending at its own elevator platform.

“Where are the hangars?” Wentz asked

“Deeper, much deeper.” Ashton’s flight boots clicked on a floor that looked like seamless steel plate, painted glossy black. “Three of them, in fact, are six hundred feet deep, built into layered bunkers that will withstand a fifty-megaton subsurface detonation.”

“This place must’ve cost billions.”

“Nintey-five billion to be exact—”

Wentz gaped. “That almost one-third of the annual defense budget!”

“This is all black money, General. Uncle Sam has ways that would surprise you. The facility consumes nearly ten billion a year just in maintenance and operating costs. This is Level One, obviously the surface-access level—this is just the top of the cake.”