by Alan James
As he approached the plane, Kelly started to look at it in a slightly different light. ‘Hadn’t the little piece of chrome in his breast pocket,’ he thought, ‘and this big piece of chrome now standing in front of him, just saved his life.’ He thought so.
He used the ladder to climb onto the wing. He had thought of laying hands on the leading edge and vaulting aboard like Cory had earlier, but now, somehow, he thought a little more respect was due. Kneeling at the cockpit, he gave it a quick once over. He didn’t recognize much. The dash was the same flat shape below the windscreen, but, now it was completely smooth. The instruments, switches, everything, was gone. The stick was still there, but it too had undergone a change. It was no more then a chrome broomstick, about the same height as before, but Kelly thought it looked pretty spindly. He wondered how it would hold up if he had to crank a really tight high “G” turn. Surely the feedback would bend or break it in two.
The seat … he looked at it closely … it was the only thing in the cockpit that hadn’t changed. Standard issue, high backed to break the bullet proof glass if a pilot ever had to punch-out with the canopy jammed in the closed position. The old harsh upholstery was still there, complete with the blood stain left by Parker.
He keyed the walkie-talkie, “I’m going to climb inside. Keep an eye on her nose and let me know, quick-like, if she goes red.”
Forest didn’t answer, he just keyed-to–talk to let Kelly know he got the message.
Kelly raised himself from his knees and stepped across the seat with his right foot. With one hand on each side of the now much skinnier cockpit, he lowered himself into the seat, tucking his arms inside to finish in one smooth move. Looking around from this position, he still didn’t recognize much. The trigger arming switch that he was interested in was gone, as was the trigger itself on the stick. He hadn’t a clue how to start this thing. He remembered Matson touching the fuselage outside to make the canopy open. He raised his hand and touched what used to be the instrument panel at a point where he thought the arming switch used to be, with no results. Like Matson, he slid his fingers around, increasing his search area. He yanked his hand from the panel as a small area below his fingers began to glow a soft red. Suddenly the walkie-talkie came to life, “Kelly, she’s armed herself again, be careful.”
“Yeah,” said Kelly, “I think I did that. I might be gettin’ the hang of this thing. Looks like everything’s still here, I just have to go lookin’ for it.” He touched the red glow, the light went out. “How’s that?”
“Good! She’s dark again,” came the reply.
Kelly wanted to know for certain where the trigger had moved itself. ‘Probably still on the stick,’ he thought, but he wanted to be sure. However, he decided that this wasn’t the safest place to try and find it; not with friends inside and close to the line of fire.
He put his right hand up and over his head, reaching behind for the front lip of the canopy. Before his fingers came in contact with the clear glass, it snapped forward, just missing his fingertips. It gave the same resounding thud of authority it had issued when it opened earlier. The line where the two canopy pieces came together, quickly disappeared. He knew it was locked. He reached skyward and pushed. It wouldn’t move. As he reached forward to the point where the two pieces had just joined, the canopy separated again and opened quickly. The little light went on as his grey matter started putting two and two together. ‘Could it be that easy’, he thought. He reached again, up and to the rear, keeping his hand out of the way this time. Again the canopy closed and sealed. He noticed, this time, that the canopy had started moving before his hand had gotten very close to it. “Ha,” he laughed, “I do have this thing figured out,” he said under his breath … “at least this part.” He leaned forward, this time holding his hand in his lap; just thinking about opening the canopy. Again the slit appeared forward of his head and the canopy once again snapped open, this time much faster and with much more authority.
“Hey Kelly,” Matson called from inside, “the choppers are changing direction.”
“Which way are they headed?”
“Uh,” Kelly could hear Matson asking the doctor something in the background, “look Kelly, neither me, nor the doctor know enough about readin’ this scope to know.”
“OK, listen. That scope in front of you, with its back to the end of the trailer, is in perfect north/south alignment. Pretend it’s lying flat on the table and you’re sitting in the middle of it. North is forward and south is behind you. Got it?”
“Yeah, OK, then they’re moving to the north of us, yes, to the north of us, about halfway up the screen from us,” he paused, “if we’re in the middle … hey!” he exclaimed with a hopeful smile in his voice, “… that means it might not even be Nevada, huh? … may be helicopters from Yuma on a training mission. They’re gonna pass right on by us … huh?”
“When’s the last time you saw helos out this way?” Kelly answered quickly. “I think it is Nevada, and I know exactly what they’re doing. They’re gonna swing wide to the north for a while, just like they’re doin now, then they’ll head south and come in out of the morning sun from the east. If we hadn’t caught ‘em on radar, we’d a been dead ducks. At least now, with them flying that big loop around us, we’re gonna have another twenty or thirty minutes to do something about ‘em.”
With hands again braced on either side of the cockpit, Kelly pushed himself to a standing position. As he stepped out onto the wing, he keyed the walkie-talkie again, “I’m coming back inside. One of you needs to get Cory up and movin’ around. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He laid the ladder against the side of the trailer; next to the holes made by the three port side guns, and as he looked back at the canopy, he had barely begun to think, and it closed.
THE HANGAR
Dr. Forest braced the still dizzy Cory with a forearm under his armpit. The youngster was still suffering from his tangle with the plane’s leading edge.
“Keep him movin’,” Kelly ordered as he entered the trailer. We’re all gonna have to be in one of those old hangars on the other side of the runway before they get here.”
“That’s almost half a mile Kelly,” the doctor offered. “In a couple hours he might be able to try it, but, in the shape he’s in now, he won’t even make it to the taxiway.”
Kelly walked to the radar screen and checked the position of the helicopters. “Oh no!” he let the words slip, under his breath.
“What is it?” said Matson.
“Oh … it’s nothin’,” Kelly said as he switched the console off, “they’re traveling a little faster than I thought.” He didn’t want the others to know that he had spotted six more targets coming in from the northeast. They would rendezvous with the first three in minutes. “C’mon, we’ve got to hurry.” As he reached to turn off Will’s screen, he saw the nose of the little three-view. It was red again. Kelly smiled.
“We need a car. You guys said you used a car to go to town once in awhile. We need it now if we’re gonna take Cory with us.”
“Yeah, we got one,” Cory mumbled, thinking he might be left behind if someone didn’t produce one immediately. “The last time I used it I parked it out on the other side of the fuel pumps … filled it up too.”
With Forest and Matson on each side of Cory, the four headed for the door. Kelly brought up the rear. As he got to the hallway, the little pistol that Perkins had held on them earlier, caught his eye. It had been swept up with the bloody remains.
“Hold up fellas,” he said as he bent over to pick it up. He wiped it down with one of the towels that had been used to clean Cory’s wound. “Got a box of shells for this?”
“Nah,” Cory mumbled again, “what was in it, was all we had.”
Kelly thumbed the release and opened the cylinder. One live round. He put a finger over it, raised the barrel, and let the spent cartridges fall to the floor. “Looks like only one of
us gets to commit suicide.”
The others stood looking back at him, slacked jawed. “I’m joking,” he quipped, “now get movin’.”
As they reached the bottom of the steps, “It’s over there,” Matson said, pointing with a nod of his head, “behind that little pump house.”
They walked to the south east, leaving the plane in full view. As Kelly turned to look at it, he wondered if this would be the last time he ever saw it. He wondered if the few minutes ahead might be the last time he ever saw anything.
There, on the other side of the pump, was an old forty-seven Ford four-door sedan. Mud encrusted the fender wells; the passenger side windshield was broken and hanging inside by the weather stripping. The package tray window was sun bleached and cracked to the point that it was completely opaque.
They helped Cory into the back seat. There was plenty of room for him to lie down. Dr. Forest followed, and sat on the edge of the seat at Cory’s feet. Matson, after giving a yank on the broken windshield to remove it, sat in the passenger seat. Kelly made his way around to the other side and as he cranked down on the door handle, it came off in his hand. He tapped on the window and showed it to Matson, who leaned over and opened the door.
As Kelly slid in, he reached for the ignition. No key. “Cory?” he said turning his head to the rear.
“Visor,” was the quick reply.
With the key in the on position, Kelly pushed the dash mounted starter button. He had envisioned a nearly dead battery and then having to push this old tub halfway across the runway to get it started. Instead, after two quick revs, the big V-eight came to life. He looked out the windshield and surveyed what lay in front of him: dirt for about twenty feet, then wild grass and small weeds.
“Can you drive one of these things?” he asked Matson.
“Of course I can. Why would you think differently?” was Matson’s semi-terse reply.
Kelly shrugged his shoulders, “Here,” he said, sliding out. “Pull her up about twenty feet or so, just into that grass.”
“Where are you going?” Matson asked as if Kelly were leaving them behind.
“Just do it,” he said slamming the door.
As the car pulled forward, Kelly made for a huge tumble weed that had rolled up against the pump house. He brushed the footprints they had made walking from the trailer, and the tire tracks, all the way to the grass line. Matson already had the door open and slid back to his side, but he had left the Ford in first gear so Kelly had to chase it a few feet before jumping behind the wheel. “I thought you said you knew how to drive one of these,” he said with a wry smile.
Kelly drove toward the taxiway, making sure to stay on all the vegetation he could find. Once on the asphalt he turned to the right and headed for the runway apron at the approach end. The hangars on the other side were all connected to the main runway with turnouts, followed by another taxiway, and a few more turnouts, that led to a large parking area running the length of all seven hangars. He wouldn’t have to worry about leaving tire tracks on this side.
The large, transport sized, hangars were in a line parallel with the runway. Windows were broken along their sides, and the huge sliding doors on each, were locked. They needed to hide the car, and Cory was in no shape to crawl through a window.
“Let’s shoot the lock off of one of them,” offered the doctor.
“We’ve only got a thirty-two caliber handgun and those are heavy padlocks. Even close up, the best you could hope for is to dent one, and you’d more than likely catch a ricochet instead.”
“All these hangars have doors on the other side,” the Doctor said, “we could try those.”
“Yeah, and all these hangars have nothin but dirt down both sides. The choppers would see our tracks in a heartbeat.”
Cory lifted his head in the back seat, “The perimeter road.”
“Of course,” said Matson, “there’s a perimeter road. All we have to do is go to either end of the runway. Once we get on it, it’ll take us all the way around to the other side of these hangars. We’ll be on asphalt all the way.”
Kelly turned the old Ford around and headed back to the south end of the runway. He hooked a left and they paralleled the fence line until the road began a slow bend to the north.
Kelly kept one eye to the sky in the direction they were heading. He wasn’t sure how much more time they had, but he didn’t expect that the choppers were to the east of them yet.
He pulled in front of the first hangar door. They could see, without getting out, that the padlock was securely in place. It was the same for the next three, but as they neared the fifth hangar Kelly noticed that the lock had a shiny ring at each end of the horseshoe where it entered the main body of the lock.
“Somebody’s been in this one, and wanted to get back in again without using a key,” he said to Matson as he stepped from the car, “but they didn’t want anyone else to know. See here,” he pointed to the telltale sign of no patina. He grabbed the body of the lock and pulled down sharply. It opened with a crack that echoed through the huge empty building.
They were in full morning twilight now, the sun not quite up, but they could easily be seen by anyone that might be near. Kelly knew they had to get inside quickly. As he leaned on the edge of the door to push it open, he found that the desert winds had packed the rolling track with sand and debris. With Dr. Forest scraping the track with a jack handle they had found in the trunk, Kelly and Matson heaved against the door. It moved slowly at first, then, finally, they had enough room to drive the car inside.
Kelly parked the car under a storage loft that had been erected in the southwest corner. The doctor and Kelly helped Cory up the metal staircase and got him situated on his blanket in the corner. The head wound was apparently worse than the doctor had thought, for Cory, despite his short spells of lucidness, was beginning to show signs of severe concussion. They shifted a couple wooden crates and pallets toward the corner to hide him.
Below, they did the same with the car. There wasn’t enough junk to hide it completely, but at least it looked like it had been parked there for years.
Kelly and Matson, leaving Forest to look after Cory, moved to a position at the northeastern-most window. They had a clear view of the sky to the east from there, and the window was dirty and sun baked enough to make it difficult for anyone to detect motion inside, at least at a distance.
Kelly reached down and put a hand on the pistol in his front pocket. It gave him only a small scrap of confidence, for at the same time he wondered what good the little thirty-two was going to be against nine choppers filled with thirty or forty of those suited, sunglass wearing soldiers, or commandos, or whatever these guys were, coming from Nevada.
***
Kelly pulled up a couple small packing boxes that had been stacked in the corner. He slid one to Matson and sat on the other. They kept watch to the northeast and east. Kelly wanted the earliest warning possible. He knew that in the exclusive circle of fighter pilots, the one that spotted his enemy first was most often the victor. Maybe not often, in as lopsided a battle as this one promised to be, but, none-the-less, he wanted any edge he could get.
“Matson,” he said to the now much older looking man staring forlornly out of the dirty and cracked window pane in front of them, “tell me what you know about these people from Nevada.”
Matson turned slowly toward him, “How on earth did this happen?” he mused.
It seemed Kelly could see all the way to the back of the old man’s head. His eyes were completely empty. “Look, Ken,” he offered with a soft touch to Matson’s shoulder, “if we have any hope at all, it’s in the three of us … you, me and the doctor. Now, pull yourself together and give me a little help here.” He paused as he saw the lights coming back on in Matson. “The guys from Nevada, tell me about them?”
“What I know won’t help much, but I’ll tell you what little there is. Our contact in Maryland is our only l
ink to information on the outside. After the suits came to take the first disc, our friends went silent on us. For awhile we thought that they had been taken, or worse. We hunkered down and tried to keep an even lower profile than usual, until, finally, we heard from them. They had destroyed files, hidden other information and kept their heads down, just like us. They are, or were, original members of the Office of Strategic Services when it was formed under William Donovan back in forty-two. After the war, that agency was broke up and handed over to the war department. Our guys maintained connections, and when Truman formed the Central Intelligence Agency in forty-seven, they all had new jobs. Problem was: there was a new group of hawks that had Truman’s ear. They talked him into that new base in Nevada, and our friends were left out in the cold. This was a group of people, like the US military had never seen before. They answer to nobody but the President, and our guys tell us that they told Truman only about a tenth of what they have goin’ on; and Eisenhower almost nothing. They rounded up the country’s best scientists from all fields aeronautical, and any fields close enough they deemed important. They pay ‘em huge bucks and had them sign their lives away just to get on board. They call their projects black operations and word is they are authorized to use deadly force at their discretion to protect their work or their persons. The projects are paid for from a fund that doesn’t show up on anyone’s ledger books … supposedly money from illegal armory sales.” He stared at Kelly for a moment, “So, if you’re wantin’ to know if we’re really in trouble” Kelly raised an eyebrow, already knowing the answer, “I’d say yeah, we’re in big trouble. They ain’t gonna like it one bit that we’ve been playing with one of their toys for the last three years … and keepin’ it a secret from them to boot.”
Kelly chuckled, “I thought you said you didn’t know much about these guys?”
Matson returned with a chuckle in replying, “Mostly useless information.”
“Not really my friend. You told me what I needed to know. Now I know one thing for sure, our lives depend on that little chrome plane on the other side of the runway. It’s our only hope of getting out of here alive.”