by Dean M. Cole
Chapter 19
Vaughn threw the last bundle into the Hummer's back seat and closed the door before the whole mess could come tumbling out. Then he turned and stared up at his hilltop house. He'd adopted the mansion shortly after his aborted suicide. The big, east-facing home overlooked Boulder from its perch atop a Rocky Mountain foothill. During the last six weeks, Vaughn had grown to love the home, but now he was leaving it all behind.
And that was just fine with him.
Vaughn felt alive!
The conversation with Angela had cleansed him somehow. The sound of her voice, the words and the laughter that they'd shared had lifted two months of dread and loneliness. But Vaughn could still feel it all there, hovering over him like a guillotine held up by an unraveling rope.
Thanks to Vaughn's failure to connect the dots, the woman's very life now hung from that thin, unwinding thread. In Angela's weakened condition, another space station system failure or even something as simple as a minor bacterial infection would snap the line.
Vaughn turned from the house and climbed behind the wheel of the heavily provisioned Hummer. Its engine roared to life. He mashed the accelerator.
He had almost gone straight to the helicopter after sharing his plan with Angela, but his trek across the Plains and its tornadic storm had taught him the value of preparation. The house held all of the hard-to-find provisions that he would need for the trip across the mountains.
As Vaughn guided the vehicle through Boulder's and then Denver's choked streets and highways, he thought over his plan.
The man had always wanted to be an astronaut, but as Mark had so adroitly pointed out, Vaughn had never proactively pursued the dream. Well now, astronaut or not, he needed to get into space, and he was pretty sure that he'd find something that would get him there at the Air Force's not-so-secret military base in Southern Nevada, the one popularly known as Area Fifty-One.
Aurora—the spaceplane, not the city—was supposedly a single-stage-to-orbit or SSTO vehicle. If it existed—and Vaughn had several reasons to believe that it did—the plane would be able to take off from a runway and fly into space using nothing but its on-board engines.
Finally, Vaughn guided the military four-by-four through Aurora—the city—and back on to Buckley Air Force Base.
An hour after that, the man had transferred the truck's contents into the Black Hawk and topped it off with jet fuel. After putting the helicopter through a thorough pre-flight inspection, Vaughn strapped himself into the pilot's seat. A few minutes later, the Black Hawk climbed into the blue sky.
The pilot turned it west, toward the Rockies.
As the helicopter rolled level, Vaughn stared at the mountain range, shaking his head.
"Shit!"
A miles-thick gray blanket of dark clouds now obscured its upper reaches. The hoary mantle flowed from draws and valleys, pouring out of the mountain range and streaming into the foothills like an ethereal glacier.
Sometime during the day, a late-season snowstorm had spilled over Colorado's back range.
"Wonderful!" Vaughn said, meaning anything but. How in the hell was he going to get around that?
He wasn't. A storm like that might extend a thousand miles north, south, or both. Without satellite or weather radar, he had no idea which way to deviate or how far he might have to go to get around it. He couldn't get over the weather either. The helicopter wasn't pressurized, and it didn't have an oxygen system.
Normally, Vaughn would plot an instrument route through the mountains. However, in the last couple of weeks, all of the electrical grids had finally kicked the bucket. That eliminated land-based navigational aids, leaving only space-based GPS. However, that navigational system required constant updates and tweaking to maintain accurate positional data. The current margin of error was just as likely to guide him into a mountaintop as it was to accurately navigate him through a mountain pass. He didn't want his last words to be, "What's that tree doing in a cloud?" said cloud being of the cumulogranite variety.
Even if he climbed into the storm, trusting the helicopter's de-icing and anti-icing equipment to keep it flyable, he'd still have to maintain an altitude greater than 15,000 feet just to safely clear all of the mountains between Denver and the state's western border. Again, not a good idea without O2.
Vaughn would have to fly through the storm, but he'd have to do it at an altitude that allowed him to see the ground. The pilot would be flying IFR alright, but not Instrument Flight Rules, more like: I Follow Roads. He'd have to keep it low and at a speed that didn't outfly his visibility.
The Black Hawk descended until it was flying just a few hundred feet above Interstate 70. In front of the helicopter, the highway disappeared where it passed into Mount Vernon Canyon.
The pilot shook his head as he looked at the looming gunmetal clouds and the spreading fan of snow that poured through the canyon's rocky cleft.
"Fuck me."
The first flakes began to race around his windshield. Up to this point, Vaughn had been able to maintain better than five hundred feet, but as he entered the falling snow, he guided the helicopter lower, flying ever closer to the surface of Interstate 70.
Visibility continued to degrade.
Vaughn shook his head. "Really?!"
The slopes of the mountains to his left and right began to disappear. Everything above his spinning rotor blades was gone.
A dark horizontal rectangle emerged ahead. Vaughn narrowed his eyes as he tried to make it out, but the object refused to resolve. In the storm's reduced visibility, he couldn't even discern its distance. "What the hell is—?"
Then the rectangle rapidly expanded in apparent size and shifted from charcoal to green, "Interstate 70 West" emblazoned across its surface.
"Shit!" Vaughn screamed as he yanked back on the stick. The broad sign passed mere inches beneath the chin bubble of his helicopter. In an instant, it was gone along with the rest of the world as the aircraft flew up into the storm clouds.
"Oh shit! Not good!"
The man shoved the stick forward, arresting the climb. Then he initiated a slow descent, his hand taut on the control, ready to stop the downward motion as soon as he could see again.
Normally, he wouldn't even think of trying to reacquire visual contact with the ground while buried in a storm …
In the mountains!
Any other time, he would have climbed away from the surface and turned back toward clear air and Denver.
"Shit," he said through a growl, stretching the word into two syllables. Every muscle in his body tensed in anticipation of the coming ground. Breathing heavily, the man clenched so tightly it felt as if half a yard of seat canvas had climbed up his colon.
Fortunately, the Black Hawk's stability augmentation and attitude hold would keep the helicopter level and on a steady track. Vaughn knew the area. No turns interrupted this stretch of I-70. He just had to hope that he hadn't drifted too far left or right during his panicked climb.
The radar altimeter counted down from two hundred feet.
Vaughn shook his head. "Should've taken the Lear."
He'd seen the jet at Buckley, but that really wasn't an option. Any plane capable of climbing above this storm needed to have a long runway waiting at the other end of the journey. Angela didn't have time for him to make a Nevadan dress rehearsal. He had to get there.
The Area Fifty-One airfield sat on a dry lake bed, 'dry' being the operative word. If this storm had crossed that area, it was likely to be a wet lake bed or just a lake.
"You're a helicopter pilot, Captain Singleton," he said through clenched teeth. "Make it work!"
Vaughn cast another glance at the digital radar altimeter.
Less than a hundred feet!
Nothing but white!
The GPS's ground speed was only twenty knots. Even if another sign presented itself, he should have adequate response time to avoid it without rocketing up, back into the storm.
Vaughn's heart raced.
Maybe
he should have turned back.
Just as he had the thought, a treetop emerged from the storm and brushed his door. Then a line of them came into view to his front right. Vaughn eased the stick to the left, narrowly avoiding the next tree. He could see more of them on his far left. Looking between his feet, through the helicopter's chin bubble, the pilot saw a ribbon of white cut between them.
"The roadbed!"
He guided the helicopter back over the center of Interstate 70.
Another gray rectangle emerged ahead. Vaughn slowed the helicopter. Finally, the sign resolved.
Eisenhower Tunnel Two Miles
All Hazardous Material Exit US 6 Loveland Pass
Vaughn ground his teeth together again. He'd known this was coming, but it didn't make the news any more palatable.
The pilot eased the stick forward as the white-out induced by the helicopter's rotor wash threatened to overtake the aircraft. Two stressful miles later, the sign for Loveland Pass emerged from the storm, and the Black Hawk followed the exit.
Vaughn's body tensed—as did his rectal sphincter. The man feared he'd likely sucked up a whole yard of the seat canvas by now.
He smiled self-consciously. "Definitely getting my fiber today."
The road narrowed as Highway 69 started its mountainous traverse in earnest. Like the interstate before it, 69 wasn't so much a road in this weather as a stream of snow.
The helicopter bucked and swayed as mountain winds started buffeting it. Fortunately, the path cut through the trees was much wider than his rotor diameter, so Vaughn could fly low enough to maintain adequate surface reference during the ascent.
He steered the Black Hawk around yet another bend in the highway. Blowing snow started to make it difficult for him to see its border.
Vaughn eased the helicopter right. The pines to his left rapidly diminished and then disappeared completely, but the trunks of the towering trees on the near side resolved from the storm like the rough legs of unseen giants.
With each new mile, he fought between keeping the pines close enough to see and his speed slow enough to avoid obstacles, all countered by the need to stay ahead of the rotor wash-induced white-out that constantly chased his helicopter.
As he ascended higher, the snow seemed to deepen. Here, the treetops barely protruded above it. A mile farther up the mountain, they disappeared completely. Now only periodic rock outcroppings and cliffs marked the path of the winding highway.
Vaughn shook his head. "It wasn't the snow getting deeper, jackass. It was the trees getting shorter."
He was now flying above the tree line—the point where air grew too thin to support large plants.
The worsening conditions had Vaughn's ass cutting fresh donut holes into the seat bottom.
He scanned the instruments and saw his knees trembling. Vaughn was scared, but that had nothing to do with the tremors.
It was freezing in here!
He reluctantly relaxed the death grip he had on the collective control and then released the stick just long enough to turn up the cabin heat.
When Vaughn looked back up, his mouth fell open. His arms and hands locked on the controls.
It looked as if he had flown into a white pillowcase.
He couldn't see a damned thing!
Suddenly, the main wheels bounced. Once. Twice!
"Oh shit! Ground!"
Then the helicopter tilted, threatening to roll. It must have started drifting right.
Instinct told Vaughn to apply left cyclic, but his training told him that would only accelerate the craft's rotation about the pivot point.
The pilot dumped the collective, eliminating the lift vector.
The helicopter teetered on its right wheel for a long moment as it skidded forward. Then it dropped, slamming the left main gear into the snow as it slid to a stop.
"Son of a bitch!" Vaughn screamed as he pounded the top of the instrument panel. "That was too damned close!"
The pilot looked around. He still couldn't see outside. Even with the helicopter's rotor blades at flat pitch, he was completely whited out. The aircraft had come to rest on a slope.
A hard gust rocked the Black Hawk and blasted the top off of a large snowdrift that sat just ahead of Vaughn's cockpit. Suddenly, he saw dark letters that appeared to float in the snow. They formed words. Through narrowed eyes, he tried to discern them, but then they started to march across his window. As the levitating letters neared his helicopter, the top of a sign resolved from the snow. Then the entire guidepost came into view and began to slide to the right. As the brown lettering scrolled past his right window, Vaughn finally registered the words.
"Loveland Pass," he said. "Elevation eleven thousand nine hundred and ninety feet."
Then his eyes widened. It wasn't the damned sign moving. It was the helicopter!
Suddenly, the aircraft bucked beneath him, tilted forward, and then, in a whirling cloud of snow, raced down the mountainside.
Then, dead ahead, a cliff wall emerged from the storm and towered above the helicopter.
"Fuck!"
Vaughn pulled the stick back as far as he dared and grabbed an armload of collective.
The twin turbine engines screamed as they raced to supply the demanded power.
The helicopter broke free of the white powder.
Cliff wall now filled the forward half of Vaughn's universe, but as he continued to pull back on the stick, the aircraft's nose pitched up. He didn't have enough airspeed to maintain this attitude for more than a second or two, but the maneuver finally arrested his forward velocity. With its nose pointing straight up, the helicopter slammed into the cliff's rocky surface. Vaughn felt its sheet metal belly and wheeled landing gear crunch into the rocks.
Then it hung on the wall!
Finally, the helicopter surrendered to the laws of physics and began to slide backward like an airplane doing a hammerhead stall.
Vaughn kicked in right pedal. The aircraft responded by pivoting about its mast.
Now he was rushing at the ground nose first!
With max power applied, the Black Hawk quickly accelerated. He eased the cyclic aft, balancing the need to arrest the helicopter's descent against the requirement to build enough airspeed to fly the aircraft away from the ground.
The digital altimeter's numbers rapidly counted down as the unseen mountainside rushed up to greet him. Then the countdown slowed and finally stopped as the Black Hawk leveled off.
Vaughn transitioned to his flight instruments, but just as he surrendered to the clouds, they disappeared.
The helicopter emerged into clear air under a gray sky.
Vaughn blinked in surprise as he watched the Pacific side of Loveland Pass scroll beneath him.
The back of the storm had crossed the Continental Divide and continued east!
The pilot sighed and relaxed his cramping hands.
"Thank you!"
Southern Nevada lay a few hundred miles to his west. In that direction, he had unlimited visibility. The tallest mountain peaks disappeared into the flat ceiling of clouds, but now with the highest pass and the worst of the weather behind him, Vaughn could easily navigate their valleys and lesser passes.
He plugged KXTA—the airport identifier for Area Fifty-One's Groom Lake facility—into the navigation computer.
He gazed up into the sky.
"See you soon, Angela. See you soon."
Chapter 20
Vaughn stepped out of the hangar, slamming the metal door behind him.
Another wild goose chase! Only a ten-year-old F-16 had occupied this one.
He shook his head. Area Fifty-One was turning into one damned big disappointment. Conspiracy theorists would be surprised by the base's banality. So far, Vaughn had entered several hangars. Aside from an F-35 fighter jet that sported some unrecognizable, arcane electronics, he'd seen nothing he wouldn't expect to find at any military airfield.
It didn't help his disposition that a combination of deteriorating wea
ther, exhaustion, and fuel starvation had forced him to overnight in Utah's Canyonlands Airport. He'd finally arrived at the Groom Lake facility that morning.
Vaughn had found the field thankfully intact. No fires had broken out, and the lights were still on, although he'd soon deduced that the place was just as empty as the rest of the world.
As a military pilot, Vaughn had never heard anything to make him believe that Area Fifty-One housed either aliens or UFOs, but he had heard whisperings that the Air Force kept a spaceplane here. Named the Aurora, the plane was supposed to be a single-stage-to-orbit hybrid. Vaughn had even seen evidence of its development in images from Google Earth. He had spotted a pair of long, curving monorails that crossed a large swath of the adjacent dry lake bed. Those discrete rails continued their ever-flattening trajectories until, finally running straight, they joined the centerlines of the airfield's two longest runways.
Vaughn had read that the Aurora's hypersonic scramjet wouldn't even light until it reached supersonic speeds. For several years now, NASA had been testing the engine type in a long, sleek experimental airplane dubbed the X-43. Its scramjet had to be accelerated by a rocket motor and wouldn't provide thrust until it reached those high speeds.
So when Vaughn had seen the monorails, he'd reasoned that the Air Force or the CIA must have used rockets to accelerate a scramjet-equipped spaceplane along that rail until it reached a velocity conducive to its use. However, voids now dotted the curving lines like broken links in a chain, so the spaceplane's technology must have progressed beyond the need for rails.
Vaughn believed that the Aurora was the realization of that improvement and that he would find it here at the Groom Lake facility.
But every building that the man had entered had looked just like all of the military hangars he'd visited throughout his career.
When he'd seen the electricity still working, Vaughn had worried about the base's electronic security systems, but so far, he hadn't found any locked doors. Just as the thought occurred to him, the knob in his hand refused to turn. He leaned a shoulder into the door, but it wouldn't budge.