A Twist in Time

by Frank J. Derfler

  "Good." was Rae's response. Then he heard her on the radio. "Adder three, we are an F-5 coming up on your left side. Are we clear to join?"

  "Rae darlin! How nice of you to call!" It was clearly Jack's voice. "Would you scoot over to my right side and tell me what you see? I've got her straight and stable right now anyway." As they got closer, Jose and Rae could see the kangaroo in a circle roundel of the Royal Australian Air Force on the fuselage.

  Jose had already climbed above the damaged jet's altitude and now he drifted to the right side. A he dropped level he winced. On the radio, Rae said, "Jack, you probably had a compressor blade fly off. You have a big hole in the right side fuselage; most of your right side tail is gone. I'd say you have no elevator on the right side. "

  Jose trimmed the attitude of the F-5 and it moved forward slightly. "Adder three, there are also holes in your right wing," Rae added. "How's the fuel?"

  "She's on fumes" was the reply.

  "Come right to one nine zero for a straight in to the Nellis runway." Rae had punched in the Direct command on her GPS and on the display she had a line from the nose of the F-5 to the centerline of runway at Nellis. "Range Control, we need a straight in."

  "Sneaky two one, we will coordinate that," the controller replied over the radio. "Be advised that auxiliary field six is on your nose for seven miles. Runway one eight there is six thousand feet by fifty feet wide. No crash rescue. Runway only."

  "Jack," Rae said, “Can you land that thing?"

  "I don't want to punch out," was Jack's tense reply. "We need to find out what blew up. I can control it if the left engine keeps running. Fuel totalizer shows zip."

  "I think you should go for the auxiliary field right on your nose. You need to slow it down right now and get into an approach configuration."

  Before she finished speaking, the landing gear on the Australian fighter came down. "Gear down and locked." Jack reported.

  At the same instant, Jose had cut the power to the F-5 and raised the nose. Then, after he slowed to the speed of the F/A-18, he smoothly pushed down the nose and lowered his own gear. "I have the field in sight." he said to Rae over the Intercom. Rae pulled herself up to see low out the front of the airplane.

  "Jack, you want to follow us to the field?"

  "Lead the way." was the terse reply.

  Jose put on a tiny amount of power and pulled ahead of the A/F-18. "What's your stall speed, Jack?" Rae asked.

  "Who knows with all this stuff gone? I'd like a hundred and eighty knots and nose down to keep it together." Jack wanted to keep the airplane fast because he didn't know when it would stall and just stop flying.

  Jose was torn between raising the gear of the F-5 because of the excessive speed or leaving it down in case they inadvertently touched the runway. He elected to leave it down so the picture looked right to the pilot of the damaged airplane behind him. The F-5 moaned and howled with the excessive speed on the deployed landing gear. Jose had them descending at fifteen hundred feet a minute and it wasn't enough. The narrow runway was too close. "Too high!" he told Rae on the intercom.

  "Jack" Rae said. Remember that twenty-degree space shuttle approach I taught you? This is it. Just get lined up and do a nice flair and you'll be good."

  "Jose, altitude and fuel?" Rae was being the perfect co-pilot. She was reminding Jose on the intercom about the two things he could never have too much of.

  "About one thousand feet above ground level and a lot of gas." was his reply. Even as he said it, their descent rate took them down to five hundred feet over the beginning of the runway. "

  "Adder three, cleared to land," was what Rae said to Jack.

  "Going around." Jose said on the intercom. He raised the gear on the F-5, went to maximum non-afterburner power on the throttle, and gently raised the nose. Rae struggled to look back at Jack's plane. She had no idea if he had maintained control when he tried to pull out of his steep approach. Jack and his plane could have simply made a crater in the runway.

  As Jose gained altitude he pulled back the throttle, stopped his climb one thousand feet above the desert runway, and made a tight bank to the right. Looking down now out the right side of the canopy, Rae and Jose could see the Super Hornet off the far end of the narrow runway. Jose continued circling, instinctively doing a maneuver called a turn around a point, until the canopy of the A/F-18 went up and Jack waved his arms.

  "Range control, Sneaky two one," Rae said. "Adder three landed safely at auxiliary field six. He's going to need help as soon as possible."

  "Sneaky two one, helicopters are on the way. Say fuel state and intent."

  Jose pushed the transmit button on his stick to reply. "Sneaky two one has three thousand pounds and is RTB."

  "Return to base?" Rae asked innocently over the intercom. "I was just starting to have fun."

  Since they reported having a lot of fuel, the Nellis approach controllers took their time in getting Sneaky two one into the pattern behind fighters that had sucked their tanks dry in dog fights. When they had parked their white jet, gathered their gear, and climbed down the ladders, Jose downed a bottle of water and started doing some paperwork for the operations log on a clipboard.

  The air was filled with the sound of airplanes, but over that sound came a roaring. They both turned to see a huge armored truck pulling up in the taxiway next to their airplane. Three rugged looking men in camouflaged fatigues piled out. They formed up, marched smartly to Jose, and the lead man saluted. Even though he didn't have any headgear on, Jose snapped a smart salute right back.

  Unlike Jack, this man's accent made the Crocodile Hunter on TV sound like he was from Chicago. From a position of attention he said loudly, "Sore, I've been ordered to fetch the pilots of Sneaky two one immediately."

  Jose raised his eyebrows for a moment. “Ordered by whom?”

  "Air Commodore Charles Grey, Sore."

  "You and Air Commodore Grey are Australian, I take it?"

  "Yessir. Pilot Officer Bellinger at your service."

  Jose looked at Rae who had a smile on her face. "Well Sneaky two one pilot, this could be interesting."

  The Australians insisted on taking their helmet bags. Jose finished signing off the paperwork, handed the clipboard to a lineman, and they piled into the truck. As it started off with a jerk, Jose said, "What do you call this impressive vehicle, Pilot Officer Bellinger?"

  Australian Government Department of Defense Photo

  "Ooo, she's a Hawkei. Built in Australia. Tough piece of work she is."

  They roared past base operations and into a series of low white buildings in the Red Flag compound. The driver braked hard in front of a building with a sign proclaiming Royal Australian Air Force, Nellis Operating Location. He beeped the high-pitched horn twice and three men in flight suits came out the front door. The men piled into the back of the Hawkei and the truck roared off again. They went out through a side gate of the base and into a residential neighborhood where they pulled into the driveway of a pleasant-looking desert-style Las Vegas home. Rae and Jose got out of the truck's cab and were surrounded by happy Australians.

  Jack's squadron mates introduced themselves quickly and said things like, "Jack wasn't going'ta punch out of that un. Didn't want to lose it. I recun you saved his bum." During the impromptu party in the driveway, a woman came out of the house and introduced herself as Nelly Grey. She explained that she and her husband, Air Commodore Grey, rented the property while the Australian force was training at Nellis. "Charles says he will probably be on the telephone line all day talking about Jack's airplane. It's morning in Canberra, so they'll be right chatty. But, once he gets Jack out of the medics, Charles will send him over here."

  As she led them through the door of the house, one of the Flight Lieutenants said, "Eh Major, what's your pleasure, Old or New?" Jose gave him a blank look.

  Rae spoke up, "Give him a New. I don't think he drinks much. An Old for me." She was rewarded with a cheer from the Australians. Rae said, "He
wants to know if you want a Tooheys New, kind of a lighter lager, or a Toohey's Old. Old is a dark ale and an acquired taste. Toohey's is a beer that's been around a long time in Sydney."

  "So you and Jack did some drinking together?" Jose asked.

  "When I was in flight school there were US Air Force officers and then all others. All others included Canadians, Australians, and US Astronauts. For all practical purposes I was a foreign officer student pilot. So...” she let the thought drift off.

  Jose said, "Do you want to fly back to Boulder or are you going to stick around here and beg a ride?"

  Rae studied her beer bottle. Both she and Jose knew that they couldn't fly in a general aviation aircraft, even as passengers, if they had an elevated blood alcohol level. A joke from her time in flight school, spent with Australians and Canadians, flashed into her head. “No smoking twelve hours before flight and no drinking within twenty-five feet of the aircraft.” She stifled the comment. Jose was physically attractive, but he seemed pretty straight laced. She said, "One beer and then we'll let an hour pass?"

  Jose nodded and took his iPhone from a zippered pocket in his flight suit. He sent a text message to the Project updating his location and setting a pickup time for the aeroclub aircraft at Nellis.

  The same roaring armored truck, it carried diplomatic plates and was almost never stopped by the local police, pulled up as Jose and Rae had nursed their beers along to the very end. Jack jumped out of the cab to the cheers of his mates.

  After a proper greeting from his mates, a shower of beer, he hugged Rae and lifted her off the ground. After Jack put Rae down, he turned to Jose, but Jose put his right hand out to shake and simultaneously kept Jack at a distance by putting his left hand on Jack's shoulder. "Try and hug me and it won't be good," he said.

  It took an hour before Rae and Jose were able to politely extract themselves from the grateful Australians. Jack and Rae parted with a kiss that Jose thought lasted pretty long.

  "Well, "she said after they had been deposited back at Nellis base operations, "that was a very interesting day."

  Jose knitted his dark eyebrows and nodded.

  Chapter 6: "A Couple of Big 'What Ifs?"

  Monday September 7, 2009 1600 Eastern

  Technical Security Agency Headquarters

  Homestead Air Reserve Base, Homestead, Florida

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Dr. William E. Wirtz, PhD

  Recorded May 2012

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET/TA

  "Our strength is looking back into time and making appropriate changes. Looking forward is just guessing. So, I needed a good guesser."

  Dr. Bill Wirtz sat at his desk and rubbed his hands over his face. Back in 1995, when all this started, he thought that bouncing around the world in airplanes was fun and maybe even a little romantic. His trip back from Japan over the last twenty hours was neither one of those things. The body he lived in and the mind he occupied were completely out of sync.

  When Major General Ted Arthurs received the "eyes only" envelope, Ted hadn't even considered telling the Chairman that Wirtz was presently in Japan. The Japanese discussions weren't moving along; each side was trying to see what the other side knew. Arthurs simply ordered Bill home by the first available commercial aircraft. He rationalized that backing away and appearing to let the discussions with the Japanese seem unimportant might be a good strategy. Anyway, it was a convenient strategy for now. He was sure that whatever was in the Chairman's letter was time sensitive. Then he smiled at his own unintended pun.

  Wirtz came directly to the Project headquarters from the Miami airport. Arthurs welcomed him, retrieved the envelope from his safe, handed it off, and left the room.

  Bill Wirtz was staring at the short hand-written note while wishing his brain would kick into gear. The question from the Chairman was simple. There was no greeting, no introduction, and no signature. There was only one line on the page.

  "If the US breaks apart in 2012 or later, what's the cause and what would the pieces be?"

  Wirtz groaned. He had only met the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff once, but even then Bill had tried to make the point that the projections done by the Project were backward in time. If you looked backward in history to ask "What if” you had good knowledge of all important factors and could hold everything steady and just manipulate one variable at a time to see what happened. Looking forward was a job for a Gypsy fortune teller with a crystal ball.

  He didn't even know what the Chairman knew to make him ask such a question. What would cause the United States to break apart? What forces were already in action? The number of variables seemed infinite.

  As he sat, he knew that the only thing he could do would be to run scenarios, perhaps a few dozen would be enough, and see what the outcomes of the various scenarios had in common. But, he would need help. Who could he trust?

  Wirtz read the line of text one more time. There wasn't much to remember. He would have burned the page right then, but he didn't have matches or a lighter and he’d probably set off all the smoke alarms in the building. He did have a criss-cross shredder in his office, so he made confetti out of the page. He needed to think and he needed some quiet space, so he left the Project and headed home.

  Bill lived in a stone farmhouse on the far western edge of Homestead Florida in what was known as the "Redlands." He was almost in the Everglades. The house was 1950s on the outside and modernized, but comfortable on the inside. Originally an area of intense truck farm agriculture, the Redlands was becoming gentrified. Houses and driveways interrupted fields that delivered three vegetable crops a year and ornamental plant nurseries displaced cabbages, beans, and avocados.

  After he got home, despite the setting sun, his body insisted that it was early morning. The house smelled stale because he had been gone for several weeks so he opened the windows and doors. Sleep didn't seem possible. He sat at his computer and idly checked his email. His fingers, more than his conscious mind, took him to LinkedIn. The LinkedIn social networking forum is often referred to as Facebook for professionals. Then, again almost without thinking, he typed the name Janet Dwyer into the search box.

  After a moment of processing, LinkedIn delivered no fewer than ten people named Janet Dwyer. Bill scanned the list and found a picture of the Janet Dwyer he remembered, if you added a dozen years. According to the limited information she made public on her profile, she was a professor of history at Georgia Tech's main campus in downtown Atlanta.

  Bill shook his head. The last time he saw Janet was in 1995 in Indonesia. They had spoken after that and he had hoped to get her into the Project, but her job as an analyst in the Department of Justice got in the way. As the security concerns built up around the Project, their communications dwindled. But, at one time they had something going in more ways than one. She was still the best "What if" partner he had ever had in dissecting historical scenarios. Their physical relationship hadn't gotten very far in 1995, but they clicked. He knew it.

  Because Janet wasn't part of his network on LinkedIn, he had to upgrade from his free membership to a paid account in order to send her an internal message. After the process of paying for the upgrade and then getting setup to create an internal mail, he didn't know what to say. In the end, his momentous message was, "Hi! Can we chat? Please give me a call or send me an email." He added his contact information and sent it off. Then he shuffled around his house for a while, snacked on a can of green beans, which was the only thing to eat in the whole house, and crashed on the couch.

  It was a couple of hours later when the vibration and ringing of the iPhone in his pocket woke him. He was groggy when he answered, but wide-awake when he heard Janet's voice. They talked for over an hour. When he hung up with her, his next call was to Delta Airlines. "I'd like to go from Miami to Atlanta tomorrow afternoon. Yes, round trip. But, let's leave the return date open." Without getting off the couch, he used his iPhone to send a text message to Sally Arthurs. "Plan to sleep in.
" he wrote. "Then Delta to ATL in the PM. Saying hello to an old friend."

  He was surprised when his iPhone almost immediately beeped in reply. The text said, "Highly recommend the Ritz Carlton Buckhead. Anybody we know? - Sally"

  Bill chuckled, put the phone on his chest, and dreamed. The next day he was early for his flight.

  Chapter 7: "Spooky Stuff"

  Saturday October 31, 2009 1700 Pacific

  Rented Home of Major Jose Valenzuela, Boulder City, NV.

  Excerpt from the Personal Narrative of Mr. Jose Valenzuela

  Recorded July 2012

  CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL/TA

  "Our unit was small, but we partied hard. When we had our few episodes of terror and high activity, each person knew the other’s capabilities and strengths. I’m very proud of the things we did and are doing!”