The Ransom of Black Stealth One Read online

  Sheppard, whose memory rivaled Marie's, had evidently read every progress report on the craft. "Did you ever manage to lower its infrared signature?"

  "No way," Ullmer admitted. "We got the exhaust spread enough so it's not visible, but on any good IR scope it's a goddamn beacon in the sky. Besides its heat signature, it's still vulnerable to radar, which just pokes right through fabric and plywood and spots the metal in the engines. Not so much on Number Three. For one thing, we put Schiff-base salts in her paint. Very high radar absorption, not as much of a signal. Basically, Two is a wood-and-fabric bird. It'd burn like a boxkite if you lit a match to it."

  He ducked under the wing, motioning the others to follow, and pointed to the craft that hung above. "We built Blue Sky Three as a two-place with shrouded pusher props. A little heavy because of the skin heaters. Y'see, the skin of the entire airchine is stretched over a matrix of little electric heat strips. With heat-sensitive paint, this airchine can change color like a chameleon. We're talking more heat than you'd get from skin friction or sunlight, of course, so it carries a little weight penalty." Ullmer paused for one beat. "Not exactly the same as bein' invisible, but close. A long step in that direction. Naturally we had to uprate the engine power. Pair of little Rotax engines at first, but then we went to some air-cooled rotary jobs of our own—if anybody cares," he said, wondering if anybody but Sheppard gave a damn.

  To his surprise, CIA's Randolph did too. He cocked his handsome profile over, nodding, and spoke as if to himself. "Thousand-mile range, low observables, two-man crew. Dr. Sheppard briefed us at last week's Security Council meeting," he said by way of explanation.

  That must've been one bastard of a meeting for Foy and Sheppard, thought Ullmer, with the President watching while they admitted how we tried an end-run around CIA. "Well then. Any questions?"

  "Several," Randolph assured him, "beginning with whether Blue Sky Three is fully operational."

  "You betcha," Ullmer said. It was evident that the others awaited his answer with more than casual interest.

  Abraham Randolph was not finished, however. "Could it, for example, fly a mission over Fort Meade without detection?"

  Ben Ullmer stood perfectly still, considering the question of flight over NSA's own headquarters as if it were a reasonable scenario. Then: "Depends on whether Dr. Sheppard's boys were lookin' specifically for it, Mr. Randolph. If they weren't, it probably could. Little blip on a scope, maybe."

  Now it was Weston, for the first time, who pressed the issue. "Is Blue Sky Three advanced very much beyond anything the Other Side is flying?"

  Jesus, what a question! CIA itself controls the finest fleet of spy aircraft on earth. Of obsolete spy aircraft, some imp of ego reminded him. "All I know is what our guys and your guys tell me," Ullmer shrugged. "My guess is, the Sovs would wet their pants if they knew what this bird can do. As I understand it, they don't even know about the chameleon skin yet, never mind the range and the low IR and radar signal."

  A subtle relaxing among his visitors, and a glance between Weston and Randolph. "Good enough," Randolph said as if it were of no importance; but Ben Ullmer knew, somehow, that it was very important. The CIA leader cleared his throat, with a glance at Charles Foy, and mixed a metaphor full of frosty humor: "And now, if we could see a bird of a different color..."

  "Black Stealth One." It was Sheppard who said it, the phrase an incantation assuring Ben that it was all right, that these men too were priests of high technology, bowing before the same altars.

  Ben Ullmer nodded his head toward the far wall, a towering partition with massive panels on caster wheels. "Right," he sighed, and led them to an ordinary metal-faced door in one of those panels.

  Ben watched their faces as they stepped through into an expanse as great as the one they had left. He took no pleasure in their silent awe, feeling instead that he was giving up his virginity. They had murmured in excitement at the sight of the Blue Sky craft, but no one spoke as they stared at Black Stealth One.

  Ben gave them time for it to sink in, expecting the reaction because he still felt it himself when gazing at this creature, a vast bird of passage crafted from filament and ceramic. Like your first sight of an albatross in flight or a perfect-bodied ballerina en pointe, every line seemed so natural, so right, you wondered why any other kind existed. And you smiled, and you let the goose bumps travel over your skin until that magical moment of pure pleasure had passed.

  It had no ordinary wheels; only tiny casters on skids. No fuselage to speak of and no tail at all, only slender swept wings subtly twisted at their tips, spanning fully sixty feet with low rudders, canted inward, far out on the wings. In repose, the wings sagged as if the bird were exhausted.

  Its surface was not black, but a dull gray, glass-smooth and absorbent of light though pinpoints of sheen glistened like dew on its hide. A huge duct yawned like a manta ray's gullet in front of the wing, and it extended back to a circular exhaust vent behind the wings. A two-seat cockpit pod was suspended inside that duct, protruding aggressively forward like the head and neck of a live thing. The pod's shape was that of a flat-nosed bullet, and its canopy bulged on each side, resembling the multifaceted eyes of some enormous alien insect. Once you were near it, you could not escape the feeling that it was watching you for the slightest mistake, for a chance to inhale you through that gullet that seemed to have half swallowed its pod. An immense, all-seeing winged predator, waiting for an excuse to hunt—or for unwary prey to come nearer.

  "Some of the crew call it the hellbug," Ben said to break the spell, and then raised his voice, "Medina! You asleep in there?"

  Even before the muffled reply, Black Stealth One rocked slightly on its skids, a monster flexing mighty wings. Aldrich took a step backward, startled. "Yo," a voice called from inside the creature. "In the port wing fairing, Ben." Only a slender man could fit inside that wing.

  "I know where the hell you are. Come out and meet your betters," Ben called with gruff good humor.

  Chuckles from Sheppard and Weston, and more of that rocking motion from Black Stealth One. Ben led them nearer with, "You see how a man's weight affects it; you won't believe it but this bird weighs under five hundred pounds empty."

  Over someone's soft whistle he said, "And her radar cross-section is just about nonexistent, God's truth."

  "Similar to the B-2?"

  "The stealth bomber is low observable," Ben agreed, "but its signature is the size of a hawk's. The hellbug? More like a hummingbird. We're talking nonobservable here. Structure's almost entirely kapton, carbon, and polymer, which damn near floats, and the rotary engine's mostly ceramic. Even the nuts and bolts are polymers loaded with quartz filament. We've only got test-hop tanks in her so far, but her wings are thick enough to carry fuel for four thousand miles. They wouldn't be tanks, exactly; we call it 'wet wings.'"

  "How long would it take to install wet wings, Ben?" Sheppard's gaze held the same keen interest that Randolph's had.

  "Couple of months. Have to move her upstairs into Blue Hangar for that. She can't vertol with that much fuel, though. She'd need a short run, maybe a hundred feet. Medina's logged about ten hours of test flights."

  "Nobody mentioned that," Weston blurted. "This thing can take off vertically?"

  "And land the same way." Ben Ullmer squatted at the sleek nose of the craft, tapping a rounded opening beneath, the diameter of a basketball and thin as stovepipe. "This is an exhaust for the diverter waste gates. Another one under each wing. When you swap an external propeller for an impeller inside the airplane, and bolt it to a couple of hundred horsepower, you get a ducted fan that'll pump air like God's own vacuum cleaner. When you deflect the exhaust through these big suckers, the whole airchine will rise straight up."

  "That, I must see," said Dar Weston, risking the knees of a five-hundred-dollar suit as he knelt. Then, perceiving that a man's head had just popped from a hatch where the wing joined that yawning duct, the CIA man chuckled. "Well, hello there." He turned b
ack to Ben. "What else will this bird do that the others won't?"

  Ullmer watched as the man eased himself from the hatch, a sweat-covered wiry fellow wearing spotless coveralls and cloth gloves, with the dark eyes and blue-black hair of a latino. Fine squint lines hinted that the man was older than he at first looked. Ben introduced the visitors to Raoul Medina.

  "You flew for us awhile," said Randolph when Medina had emerged barefooted to sit on a protective pad. "I believe you have a jockstrap medal back at Langley." CIA men joked that Company medals could be worn only on your jockstrap, and the medals rarely left Company headquarters at Langley, Virginia.

  "Yessir," Medina agreed, smiling, wiping sweat from his face, moving from the wing root to a nearby inspection stand. "Before you were DCI."

  "Some passes in a U-2R over 'Nam and China, against stuff that might've brought you down," Randolph persisted.

  "Yessir," Medina repeated, the smile unchanged as he folded the blanket-sized pad.

  "But it didn't, and here you are with NSA," Randolph said, smiling back, supplying words for a man who seemed to lack them.

  "That was then. This is now," said Raoul Medina, with an easy candor that avoided insolence by a millimeter. He began to position the hatch cover with loving care. As if to atone for his earlier brevity, Medina kissed his fingertips and placed them on the wing. "And this, as they say, is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. She's a handful when hovering but compared to anything else that hovers, she's quiet as mice."

  "How many people can fly it?"

  "Only him, so far," Ben Ullmer put in. "Raoul got his A and P ticket after he left you. Pilot first, master mechanic second. A lot of Black Stealth One is his doing; his and Corbett's."

  "That means you must've designed it before, um, 'eighty-five," Weston mused.

  "Right," said Ben. "You have to quit changing and start building at some point, or you'd never finish." Medina studied the CIA man for a moment, but said nothing. Ben went on, "I s'pose you folks want to see what else the hellbug can do. You won't believe it unless you see it. Raoul: need a preflight?"

  Medina shook his head. "What's the drill?" Pulling the gloves off with his teeth, he tugged at a flush latch below the creature's bulging left eye, which raised in gullwing fashion for his entry. He shoved his toes into a spring-loaded niche to step up. Again, the entire aircraft flexed as if shrugging. Medina snapped a five-element harness, flicking switches, scanning dials.

  "Make a circuit around us at five meters. Then back off near the wall and go to chameleon mode. Set her down in her plumage." Ben was almost smiling, an expression he had never shown to Aldrich before.

  Medina nodded and latched the canopy. Ben Ullmer led the way back to the wall where they had entered, said, "Might get a little breezy in here," folded his arms and waited.

  A faint smoky chuffing from the exhaust vent caused the craft to shake perceptibly for a moment, but as the engine's whirr sped up, the shaking ceased and the smoke disappeared. Ben said to Weston, who stood next to him, "You asked what she'll do that the others won't? Well, we pass the engine exhaust through finned mufflers behind the impeller blades; no IR signature because the exhaust jet is just cool air. And all hovercraft make a hell of a racket. Except this one." Now, Ben was definitely smiling.

  "No louder than a stiff breeze," Weston noted.

  The engine noise was not even as loud as that multiblade impeller, whirling inside the duct, gulping air around the pod and flinging it out behind. A man did not have to shout to be heard. "Don't impeller blades return a radar signal?"

  "Not if they're plastic," Ben replied. "And blades are way up inside the inlet duct; adds to the muffler effect."

  As he spoke, the hollow rush of air took on a different note, the wings rising almost as if to flap. "Diverters working for vertol," Ben said. And then Black Stealth One was rising steadily on three invisible columns of air.

  The watchers blinked away dust motes in the breeze that eddied around them, and when its skids were fifteen feet above the concrete the whole aircraft began to pivot. Ullmer shook his fist. The pivot motion stopped and Medina backed the ship away. "Just tellin' Medina what he'd get if he gave us a zap of exhaust. Blow us all flat. You want to watch his sense of humor, gents." But Medina had manipulated the craft so that it now floated near one back wall of the hangar. He lifted its nose slightly and began to parallel the wall. Backward.

  "This is absolutely staggering," said Randolph, watching Black Stealth One as it began to parallel another wall.

  After his path had described a "U" pattern, Medina moved the craft as far from them as possible. "Watch," said Ben Ullmer.

  "Jeeesus Christ," said the Director of Central Intelligence.

  The aircraft, in an instant, seemed to become transparent and virtually disappeared. Where the background was cream-tinted wall, the skin of Black Stealth One was cream. A hangar air duct, blocked by the wing, suddenly appeared to be visible through the wing. Even the vertical wall seams were reproduced, but with the faithfulness of a wayward lover, not quite perfect. The canopy, however, remained a canopy and the fidelity of the illusion was not exact for anyone but Foy, whom Medina had evidently chosen as the focus.

  When Medina caused the craft to begin rotating, more than one man exclaimed aloud; the illusion remained. The skin of Black Stealth One was changing its patterns as it rotated, to fool a watcher only a hundred feet away. Ben had learned to look slightly away from it while the craft was in chameleon mode, but the others were staring hard, trying to blink the fuzziness from their vision.

  Enjoying the slack jaws despite himself, Ben said, "From this distance it's not very convincing but put 'er a thousand feet up and, mister, she is flat fuckin' invisible. Dr. Sheppard's boys ran across the fact that the colors of some liquid crystals are voltage sensitive, and we figured out how to embed some in a skin. 'Bout a thirty-pound weight penalty for the entire skin area. Medina just gives the computer a focus viewpoint it has to fool. Its video looks in the opposite direction and paints the skin with the liquid crystal display to match the backdrop. Kinda like the pixels of a big TV screen; as she moves, she compensates."

  Aldrich, who knew the answer: "And if I move?"

  "If the computer's IR scanner is locked onto you, it compensates. It only fools one viewpoint, but the pilot can select it."

  "Another team is working on the canopy problem," Sheppard assured the audience. "If the pilot can trust video displays completely, the next version won't have a canopy."

  Weston: "Let me see if I understand this. The skin only seems transparent because the skin facing the chosen observer takes the appearance of what that observer would see, if the aircraft weren't there. And the videos on the side facing away from the observer—the back side—are in effect filming the obscured view and projecting it onto the observer's side."

  "Yeah," said Ullmer. "In effect. Goddamn little computer's got some smart parts; it even recognizes when the hellbug's own shadow is impinging on the backdrop, like when it's just above the ground. It won't let its own shadow screw up the projection. That's smart," he winked.

  By now, Black Stealth One had slid back near its original position, still two stories above them. Ben Ullmer held up his hands, linked their thumbs, and mimed a flapping with his open fingers. Medina nodded and made a console adjustment. Instantly, the Snake Pit's guests were laughing, for the wing display had become an almost-perfect replica of a bird's plumage, even to the splayed pinion feathers at the wingtips. A sixty-foot buzzard hung almost silent above them.

  "We programmed that in just for fun," Ben said. "But when she's soaring over our runway, and you've got nothing to scale 'er against—well, it'll fool these old eyes." With that, he gestured a thumbs-down and Medina let the craft settle on its skids, the soft rush of air quickly dying as Medina busied himself with a clipboard inside.

  "Now, just for your opinion, Abe." One of Charles Foy's elegant brows elevated slightly. "You agree that hiding this is worth the sacr
ifice?"

  "I do, Charles," Randolph said. His tone had a matching cool elegance, but in fact the air almost hummed with heightened anticipations. "Given how advanced this is over Blue Sky Three, it seems little sacrifice at all."

  They stood in momentary silence gazing at the craft. "Just consider," Foy said as though thinking aloud, "what one could do with only a hundred of these. It's invisible, it can land in any pasture, delivering men or devices, or bringing them back. It could hover unseen over the very Kremlin. Goodbye to all security in the most tightly controlled nation on earth."

  "That shopping list wasn't very specific." The Director of Central Intelligence pulled at his chin, noting that Black Stealth One was now a dull gray again, and turned back to the Dernza. "They specify when they can. I don't think they have a clue about what they're after, except that it's a third generation stealth program—and that's enough to make it Priority One for them."

  "My thoughts exactly," said Charles Foy. "Ben says he'll need two months to install the long-range tanks. That won't be the final product. The new canopy won't be ready, for example. But, still, it will be able to play its part in our flim-flam." He noticed a faint frown on Ullmer's face. "Excuse me, Ben, we're talking gibberish to you. Is the other side of Black Hangar secure?"

  Ullmer nodded. He got Medina's attention, mimed a throat-cut and pointed to his Breitling—"kill it; quitting time"—then led the way back through the door.

  "It's almost five," Aldrich reminded no one in particular as, without apparent intent, the men formed a loose ring near the center of the expanse.

  Foy stuck his hand out to be shaken again. "Ben, the reports don't do this thing justice. You've outdone yourselves; tell your crews I said so."

  Ullmer shifted that dead cigar. "But," he prompted.

  "No buts. It's unbelievable. Still, sooner or later we had to share the news."