After the report from the assault team, Ted and Rae drove up the mountain in a one of the Project’s trucks equipped with a bumper-mounted winch. The two would-be kidnappers were now on separate rocks about 30 yards apart.
“Do they have ID?” Ted asked.
“They’re ID says they’re university students from a school in Tokyo,” Craig replied. “They claim not to speak English.”
“If they’re really Japanese university students, that’s BS,” Rae supplied. “They might not want to speak English, but they understand it very well.”
Rae spent about twenty minutes with each student. Her Japanese was limited, but as she said, they understood English quite well. She played good cop while some of the warrant officers reveled in the role of bad cop. They growled, kicked dirt, stomped, sharpened knives, and scowled while she spoke softly and urgently. Two warrant officers earnestly searched for any kind of snake in the surrounding rocks. The only thing they found was a sleepy and under-size scorpion, but when dangled by its tail it had the desired effect on the city Japanese. The rest of the team kept busy winching and levering the Tahoe off the rock and back onto the road headed downhill.
Ted, Craig and Rae met next to the SUV. Ted said, “It’s getting dark. We need to get the Cessna out of here. Did you get anything out of them?”
“The best response I got was that they want to know what I know,” Rae said. “They’re graduate students for one of the professors assigned to the Hokkaido University project from Tokyo. Basically, they’re academic slave labor. Apparently, their professor isn’t making any progress in their version of the Project. He’s lost face and they’ve lost their funding. This was a desperate attempt to find out what we know in order to get a jump-start, to regain honor, and to regain their jobs. They spent every yen they had between them to send the four of them to the U.S to try and save the whole deal. They know me and they know Fred. That’s pretty much all they know.”
“Oh yeah,” she supplied, “the guy who was driving was pretty sure we were going to kill him at a distance. Wonder where he got that idea?”
“Do they know how seriously we take kidnapping in this country?” Ted asked. “We could put them away on state and federal charges forever.”
“I made sure they understood that,” Craig said.
Rae added, “I made sure they understood that were bringing great shame on themselves, their families, and particularly their professor.”
“I don’t want to kidnap them, but we need to get ourselves out of here. We’ve done enough to attract attention. Why don’t we just leave them here to hitchhike out?” Ted asked. “I don’t want to have another thing to do with them.”
“Sounds good to me,” Rae said.
At that moment there was a loud pop and a flash on the hood of the Tahoe. A small cube was suddenly sitting perfectly centered on the hood, Rae poured her water bottle on it and it steamed and sizzled. Four sides of the cube were engraved in a bold font with one word on each side. Read in sequence, it said, “Take them to KIGM.”
“Well,” Ted said. I guess we’ve been told. We take them to Kingman Airport. I’ll bet that’s where they were headed with you. They probably have an aircraft waiting there.”
Rae observed, “So leaving them on the mountain wouldn’t have worked out so well, I guess.”
“Apparently not,” Ted replied with some gloom.
Rae and Craig got the Cessna on the edge of the highway, waited until they saw no traffic, and took off for Nellis. Ted and two of the warrant officers headed for the Alternate Site in Rae’s Tahoe. One of the vehicles from the Project followed them in case of breakdown. That vehicle also carried the assault team’s weapons. Three warrant officers in the third truck drove the two Japanese students to the Kingman, Arizona airport and unceremoniously dumped them in the driveway of the general aviation terminal.
__________
It was dark when Craig and Rae landed the Cessna at Nellis. Jose was waiting on the ramp outside the Aeroclub. He opened the passenger side door of the Cessna, practically lifted Rae out, and hugged her tightly. Doctor Rae Dunnan, PhD, NASA Astronaut, and Navy SERE graduate, hugged him back and started gently crying. It was the first time she had shown any emotion except frustration since the whole crazy episode with the Japanese students started.
When Jose put her down, she punched him in the chest and said, “You did a tail slide in an F-5! You CAN’T do a tail slide in an F-5! But it was the most spectacular thing I ever saw. It was beautiful!”
“Are you really okay?” Jose asked.
She held him at arm’s length and looked him up and down in the glare of the ramp lights; He was wearing his typical Air Force “green bag” flight suit. “Do you have a better fitting flight suit than that?” she asked. “I’m so over getting a wedding dress.”
“Please visit me!”
Frank J. Derfler is a retired military officer, marketing executive, magazine editor, and the author of hundreds of technical articles and books. His love of technology and history, topped with a career inside the Washington Beltway, led him to the unique story line contained in “A Glint in Time” and “A Twist in Time”. He welcomes your comments and suggestion on his Facebook page called “About-Time”
A Twist in Time Page 17