by Ricky Sides
The two minutes that the teams were out of sight seemed an eternity to Tim and Cliff, who were both dying to see one of the fighters, but eventually the waiting ended and the lieutenant sounded the all clear as his team opened the huge hangar door.
The first sight that the team had of the aircraft inside the hangars was disappointing. They saw seven trailers loaded with what looked more like speedboats, covered with drop cloths, than aircraft. Tim exited the ship and had the lieutenant’s men grab one of the trailers and pull it out of the hangar. They reported that it was surprisingly light. He began unfastening the hooks that held the drop cloth in position and what he saw when he stripped that cloth away caused him to stare in awe.
Pol approached to stand beside Tim and his two words summed up Tim’s own reaction when he said, “Oh my!”
The aircraft was sleek and virtually seam free with the exception of the canopy seal. The aircraft was teardrop shaped, with the narrow end being the nose. The rounded base was the rear of the aircraft. The short stubby wings were armed with a minigun that was currently unloaded on the left, and a bomb rack on the right, which was similarly unloaded. The aircraft was approximately seven feet tall at the cockpit, which was the thickest portion of the plane. It had a foot wide rounded nose and it tapered out to twelve feet wide at the rear. The fighter had an overall length of approximately twenty-one feet and was grayish white in color.
Tim examined the cockpit hatch and quickly determined how to unlock the mechanism. Within moments, Tim had the cockpit open, and was admiring the control systems. “Why, these are so simple,” he said. “The altitude and direction are controlled by the stick. There are no rudders because it doesn’t use that sort of lift and turn system. To go up you pull back on the stick. To go down you push it forward. To turn left you push the stick to the left. The more you push the stick to the left the tighter the turn becomes. The same applies to turning right. To turn right you push the stick to the right. A simple lever style control on the instrument panel adjusts the power for speed.”
“That instrument is the power flow instrument,” Pol noted. “A crude but effective dial meter.” Then pointing to another instrument Pol said, “And that is your altimeter, and the one next to it is the forward speed indicator.”
“The covered button on the stick is probably the minigun, and the covered switches on the instrument panel would be the bomb release switches. I count three switches in here. Pete, aren’t there three bracket latches for bombs under the wing?” Tim asked.
Squatting on his haunches, Pete stared at the mechanism for a moment and then he said, “As far as I can tell, you’re right, Tim, but this is out of my area of expertise.”
“It charges very rapidly. You be sure to watch your power levels, Tim, and take it easy at first. Get to know the aircraft before any stunt flying please,” Pol requested. Then he added, “I am sorry now that I opposed you in the pursuit of fighters. If something happens to you because of my reticence, I would never forgive myself,” he added softly so that no one but Tim could hear him. “I will yield to your position without the need for dangerous stunt flying.”
“I appreciate that, Pol, but you’d have to be a pilot to understand. Just as Patricia must explore her capabilities with computers and you with engines, I must test mine with wings. It’s who I am. But have no fear my friend. I plan to fly one of these fighters for years to come. I have no intentions of doing anything stupid,” Tim reassured Pol.
“I think it has power sufficient for an easy first test flight,” Pol said grinning and Tim entered the cockpit excitedly.
“Hey, Tim!” Pete shouted.
“Yeah, Pete. What is it?” Tim queried.
“Would the first flight work out better if you flew without the trailer? Just until you get the feel of the plane of course. After that I suppose it would save time to just fly with the trailer attached,” Pete stated sarcastically causing several of those present to erupt into laughter. None laughed harder than Tim did.
Once the plane was free of the trailer, Tim climbed back into the cockpit. He shut the canopy and locked it from the inside. Taking the yoke in a firm hand, he gently nudged it back a fraction of an inch and the aircraft gently responded to the cheers of the men on the ground. Tim spun the ship slowly on its axis as he continued to climb and climb. The aircraft stopped rising and Tim verified that the altitude was four hundred feet. “Here goes nothing,” the peacekeepers heard Tim say through the radio system and the fighter surged forward at incredible speed.
Pol radioed Tim saying, “I thought you agreed to take it easy on the first flight!”
“That was just a nudge, Pol, I swear to God! This thing’s just incredible,” Tim said and they saw him execute a turn before he disappeared from sight. Now headed back toward them, his voice came back. He said, “Now this is me opening her up!” In the space of three heartbeats, Tim had passed their position and almost disappeared from sight. Slowing the fighter, he eased it into a gentle turn and headed back. This time his forward speed was slower but he altered his altitude dramatically and dodged from side to side as if making evasive maneuvers. Then with a gentle descent, he dropped altitude. For a moment, the crew thought that he was coming in to land. Then with a whoop, he accelerated and yanked back on the stick. The fighter that had been flying at about fifteen feet rocketed skyward and forward simultaneously and in a few moments she disappeared over the horizon.
Tim’s voice came back to them as he reported that the fighter was as smooth at five hundred miles-per-hour as it was at fifteen, and then he said that he was returning to the site before he got lost because there was no navigation equipment onboard. Patricia assured him that he was wearing one of the hats so he couldn’t disappear from the Peacekeeper ship but she urged him to return to them and let the new aircraft rest and recharge.
Pete approached Pol while Tim was returning and said, “I’m sorry my friend, but I have to agree with Tim. The tactical advantages of this airframe make it worth the expenditure of the rare components.”
“Don’t be sorry my friend. I agree. After witnessing this test, I’d be a fool to disagree. My one remaining misgiving is the human factor. But we peacekeepers risk our lives daily, do we not? And the pilots love their craft every bit as much as I adore my own,” Pol said with a rueful grin.
“Well said my friend,” Pete said slapping him on the shoulder in a companionable manner.
Chapter 23
The six weeks that followed the first test flight of one of the fighters was a period of organization and consolidation of the assets. Teams of California peacekeepers combed the state looking for the items Pol needed to complete all of the drones, improve, and then arm the fighters. They were successful in finding the majority of the items that Pol requested and several that they thought would be of use that he had not listed, such as flight helmets and flight suits for the pilots.
At the end of the fourth week of this period, Pol was ready to begin assembling the drones. The engines had been assembled which was the easiest part of the process for Pol since that was his specialty. All of the hulls had been produced already and the delicate battery assembly process had been completed. While one team did this under Pol’s supervision, another started assembling the subassemblies for the lasers under the supervision of Pol’s two assistants. The assistants had been flown out to California from Base 1 on one of Tim’s runs back to the base for critically needed components, which they had in quantity on the base while none could be located in California. The manual assembly of these subassemblies required skill and was time consuming. Pol had the assistants work with the people in assembly line fashion. Each man learned to do one specific task in the process and passed the part down to the next. By the end of the day, the three lines were smoothly turning out the three major subassemblies required to build the lasers at the rate of ten per hour. Pol inspected each subassembly and then assembled the final product.
Utilizing this method, in three days Pol had sufficien
t lasers with which to arm all of the drones. The lasers needed to arm all of the western drones were left at the facility. The rest of the lasers were transferred back to Base 1 via the Peacekeeper for use on the other drones that would still need to be assembled there.
On that return flight, Tim brought in the first load of the personnel who would be going through flight training. Those recruits were put to work immediately constructing a barracks for the pilots in training. The biggest obstacle in utilizing the base was the restoration of power, which had taken the peacekeepers weeks to accomplish.
The word went out to all of the peacekeeper bases that if they had any men with piloting experience who would like to try for a seat in one of the fighters then they should send them to California for the flight training. The men should be warned that fighters would be assigned to three bases, so if they got a seat in a fighter they would most likely be reassigned to another base.
It was decided that the fighters could best be utilized by maintaining three air bases. One base would be in California at the facility where they had located the first seven fighters awaiting Pentagon testing. That facility was currently undergoing improvements, which would make the base much more secure, and a permanent attachment of highly skilled and motivated men would be acting as security. Another base would be in Texas at the large base that the Texans had created near Houston. That base was probably one of the most secure bases in peacekeeper territory second only to Base 1. Base One, was the third base where the aircraft would be maintained. It had proven itself secure against multiple attacks and now had a complement of tanks to augment that safety. Tanks would also be sent to the other two aforementioned bases to augment security.
During all of the preparations, Patricia was working tirelessly to program new computers with the required programs to operate the drones and integrate them with the control systems. Three of the California peacekeepers had superb computer skills and those three acted as her assistants. When the drones were ready so were the operating systems. This team also worked on the video camera packages that made the drones such excellent reconnaissance tools and added the gear needed to be able to communicate with someone remotely.
By the end of the sixth week, everyone turned their attention strictly to the fighters. Pol and his team worked on the fighter engines. Patricia and her team devised computer operated Global Positioning Satellite interfaces to address the problem of a lack of navigational aids. A communications array was developed to send and receive radio messages and to transmit video footage during reconnaissance missions. They also added small but powerful computers that would handle the targeting with the lasers and miniguns. A search of the computer files revealed the location where a sufficient supply of the miniguns and bomb carriage assemblies had been shipped to await utilization in the black project, code named project Phoenix Rising.
Patricia had discovered during her examination of the base computers that the fighters were being developed for use in the event of nuclear war. The fighters would serve as a defense during that period of transition when fuel supplies for conventional fighters would become hopelessly unreliable. Although by no means were the fighters a match for the top of the line conventional fighters, the squadrons would be able to act as a stopgap measure to continue to provide air coverage of the continental United States. By comparison to the top of the line fighters, they were dirt cheap with a price tag under four million per unit. The plan was to store them in underground bases shielded against electromagnetic pulses. In the event of a nuclear war, they would be removed from storage and put into action against any possible invasion forces. The project had called for one hundred of the aircraft to be assembled and thus stored.
The peacekeepers of California located those supplies with the aid of the information Patricia supplied. They also discovered large quantities of the bombs and ammunition that would be needed to supply the fighters. The logistics of transporting the supplies and storing them was a nightmare but the peacekeepers accomplished the task. Though no one was happy with the temporary storage facility on the new base, it would have to do until a better permanent facility could be constructed. Work toward that goal began immediately but was expected to take months. Meanwhile quantities of the munitions were being shipped to the other two air bases under very heavy security.
The canopies of the ships were tested and it was found that they could handle small arms fire perfectly well. The larger calibers would be a problem, but then that was also true of the hull of the fighters. There was a supply of the prefabricated canopies in the Carwell Industries facility, and the location of the factory that manufactured them was discovered in the computer files. The factory was located near Sacramento, California. A peacekeeper team was sent to check on the condition of that factory and learned that it was still intact. Though sections of the facility had been damaged during the quakes, most of the damage had been repaired. Cliff suggested that the repairs had probably been made during the interim period when California had almost restored order. Now the facility appeared to be abandoned, as was most of Sacramento.
Developing the lasers for the fighters that had already been assembled proved all but impossible to accomplish. They could not be mounted in the manner that Pol wanted to mount them. They decided that the original seven fighters would be relegated to flight trainer status, though in a pinch they could be armed with the conventional weapons. Working on the unassembled components of the fighters, skilled metalworkers set about the task of altering the prefabricated sections to accommodate the laser assemblies so that after the units were fully assembled, the lasers would have a small port in the nose of the aircraft through which they could fire safely.
By the end of the ninth week, the lasers for the fighters had been assembled and the first flight training class had been started with three instructors and eighty men and women, half of which had at least some previous flight training. The top sixty in the class would get a seat in a fighter. The remaining twenty men and women would be offered drone training if they so desired. Of the remaining eleven fighters, seven would be based in California as flight trainers. One fighter was reserved for a special project. The three remaining fighters were a reserve should one of the bases lose a fighter and one would go to each base.
The Californians had sought diligently for recruits with a desire to fly a fighter. During that process, they had located three men who had served as flight trainers prior to their retirement from the air force. They recruited these men to train the pilots and they were a Godsend. They drilled the men and women extensively and soon most flew quite well. There were several female trainees who lived in a partitioned off section of the barracks during the training.
The flight instructors set up numerous scenarios in which the pilots were given missions against ground forces or ground targets. The performances of the pilots during each exercise were evaluated and graded according to the criteria set by the flight instructors who once failed the only man who managed to score a kill on a particularly difficult attack run. The pilot had been counted as killed when a defensive weapon that he had failed to neutralize scored a kill on him according to the flight instructors.
The flight training included working in conjunction with a wingman and flight leaders were selected among the most skilled pilots who demonstrated good leadership abilities. They taught the teams to take on superior numbers and survive using strategy. They were encouraged to study several books that the flight instructors provided. Those books detailed the history of dog fighting and the combat techniques of the greatest fighter pilots ever to fly.
The last segment of the flight training was the air-to-air combat. The pilots were taught the flight characteristics of everything from jets to prop planes and of course helicopters. They actually flew mock battles against two helicopters flown by the flight instructors. The flight instructors did note that the fighters would not be able to target aircraft significantly higher than their flight cap of four hundred feet, but the council
was hoping to find missiles with which they could arm at least a portion of each squadron to cope with that single shortcoming. Every major airbase had Peacekeeper teams dispatched to them in an attempt to locate air-to-air weapons systems.
At the end of the flight training, there were three days when the flight instructors studied all of the results that they had dutifully recorded for each man and woman in the flight-training program. The sixty-one pilots were selected from the top sixty-one in the class. At the last moment, Jim and Pete had visited the flight instructors and told them to pick an extra pilot as well. They wanted the name of the top pilot who fit a list of qualifications to see if he or she might be interested in a special mission. They gave the flight instructors a short list of requirements. The candidate must be able to work alone without the support of a team. He must be mentally tough, have superb flight skills, and be extremely mentally stable.
The flight instructors said they’d do their best and the two council members left.
The nineteen pilots who failed to make the cut were disappointed, but most opted to try for drone training. Their experience as trained pilots would serve them well in the drone program.
By the time that the flight training was over, all of the fighters had been assembled and were ready for service in the new peacekeeper air force. They were flown to the base during the three-day wait to determine who would become their pilots. The Peacekeeper made two trips to the air base to pick up the pilots who then climbed into the cockpits of the new fighters for the first time.
So valuable was the fighter asset that immediately after graduation the peacekeepers assigned to the Texas and Alabama air bases were ordered to fly their fighters to the base to which they were being assigned. The fighters scheduled for assignment to both air bases would fly together until the Texas bound planes had to turn south to their base.