Perilous Skies (Stony Man)

by Don Pendleton

  He only needed to move another forty feet. What was left of the aircraft abruptly lost forward momentum.

  Blancanales pulled his watercraft to a smoldering nose cone piece, with the remains of the pilot still strapped to his seat inside it. It was resting, nose-down in the water, lodged in the mud.

  It was the largest of many fragments of the aircraft that were now scattered everywhere that he could see. Fires burned in the grass and oil burned on the surface of the water, but the violent destruction had dispersed the parts—and presumably the fuel load.

  Lyons approached on foot. Already most of the flames were flickering out, with the exception of the large fuel spill spread across the road and the water at the place where the plane had cracked into the earth.

  “Stony,” Lyons said, then he was momentarily at a loss.

  “We saw the crash on thermal from the drone, Able,” Aaron Kurtzman said. “Did it burn?”

  “No. Most of it escaped the fire.”

  “Thank goodness,” Barbara Price said. “Good work!”

  “But,” Blancanales said, “you’re going to need a big cardboard box to carry it home.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A high-security go team from the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Accident Investigation Board had been dispatched to the scene. Barbara Price charged the AIB team with the responsibility to locate, tag and remove every piece of the crashed aircraft.

  They were to remove evidence of the crash occurring, including sandblasting scorch marks from the pavements and clearing fuel-burned vegetation. This was to befuddle any behind-the-scenes investigations that might come later. It was standard practice for a supersecret agency like Stony Man Farm to cover its tracks.

  A National Transportation Safety Board investigation might allocate weeks to investigating the crash site before moving the wreckage. Price gave the AIB go team twelve hours to get in, do their job and get out.

  The remoteness of the spot helped. The road was unused. The AIB’s tagalong commandos spent the time tucked into the vegetation, but no one ever showed up—no innocent civilian on a fishing trip or criminal suspect coming to investigate why a drug shipment had never returned home.

  The AIB team did what it was commanded to do, leaving the scene eleven hours and forty-five minutes after it arrived, and making haste to a private hangar adjoining LaBelle Municipal Airport.

  * * *

  JACK GRIMALDI STOOD in the long-unused hangar, put his hands on his hips and frowned at the pile of rubble at his feet.

  The go-team leader approached. He was an Air Force lieutenant colonel, but with special security clearance—and at a higher pay grade than many full colonels.

  “Colonel Ricks,” Grimaldi said, shaking the man’s hand.

  “You are my liaison?” the colonel asked, frowning. “You’re Jack?”

  “That’s me,” Grimaldi said. “Expecting somebody military, I imagine?”

  The colonel shrugged. “What I was expecting doesn’t really matter. Let me walk you through what we’ve got so far.”

  “Sure. Just so you know, I’m a pilot, but not an expert on air crash investigation. I’m looking for all the input you can give me. My main goal is to figure out the nature of this beast.”

  The colonel nodded. “I think we can give you a good idea what this thing was like. But I have to tell you, this is the strangest piece of work I’ve ever seen.”

  Jack looked hard at the colonel. “You have been briefed, Colonel? You do understand that this is one of the stealth aircraft that’s been getting all the play on the news?”

  “Like the one that attacked the hotel in Bolivia,” the colonel added. “I understand. I can also tell you, Jack, that this is one of the most dangerous aircraft I’ve ever seen. It was clearly made with very little consideration for the safety of the crew. It was made to be stealthy, to be quiet and to be lightweight. All kinds of safety compromises were made to achieve that.”

  Jack looked from the man to the mess of parts that littered the hangar, and back to the man.

  “You and your people figured all that out in just the last few hours?”

  The colonel laughed. “Jack, we figured that out just from picking up the pieces.”

  The colonel snatched up a section of the plastic fuselage that had been placed on the floor of the hangar. They had not tried to position all the body pieces in the correct place. They were just shoved together. This section was the size of a magazine, and it was curved to indicate the shape of the original aircraft. It smelled of fuel. The colonel grasped the piece in both hands and bent it in two.

  “Christ,” Grimaldi said. “Not big on structural integrity, are they?”

  “You’d be surprised. Let me tell you all about it.”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, THE TEAM was gone from the hangar. They would return to their work later. First it was time for Jack Grimaldi to conduct a solo briefing with Stony Man Farm.

  Able Team members Schwarz, Lyons and Blancanales were back at the Farm and sitting at the War Room conference table, eager to find out about the aircraft they had helped acquire.

  Jack Grimaldi had set up cameras at various points inside the hangar. He spoke into the central camera, his face appearing on the main plasma screen.

  His first order of business was to relay the initial comments of the colonel from the Accident Investigation Board.

  “The colonel was absolutely correct. These planes are unbelievably dangerous—by design. They are essentially privately designed and manufactured Very Light Jets, or VLJs. They’re also death traps.”

  “You and I have discussed the pros and cons of VLJs in the past and I thought you were okay with them,” Schwarz said. “At least on a philosophical level.”

  “Commercial VLJs, sure,” Grimaldi said. “They’re cute for my taste but they’re well engineered and safe.”

  “Why don’t you give us the well-informed civilian briefing on this VLJ,” Price suggested. “From the top.”

  “By the top, I assume you mean the brain.” Grimaldi strolled to the pile of junk near the front, where the remains of the seat could be seen. It was the nose that Blancanales had found stuck in the mud. The body of the pilot had been removed, although a lot of his blood still stained the interior of the nose cone.

  “Here’s the cockpit. Two seats. This specific aircraft had no other seats. First thing you notice about the cockpit—there are no redundant controls. If somebody needed to take over the controls of the aircraft, the pilot has to move or be moved. But once you get behind the controls, piloting this plane would be relatively easy. It’s got a pretty incredible degree of computerized automation. We’ve got the most fully electronically controlled power plant I’ve ever seen on a jet, with a full-authority digital engine computer, or FADEC. There’s data coming in from a large bank of sensors.

  “The engines are made with their own sets of sensors and limiters, which feed into the FADEC’s electronic engine controller, or EEC. The thing is built with all kinds of standardized parts. You see the same component profile again and again. Here’s the thing—half the parts are off-the-shelf, hardware-store grade. Not aircraft grade.”

  “But have you figured out how it’s so stealthy?” Aaron Kurtzman asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” Grimaldi said. “Look at this.” He held up the piece of the body panel that Colonel Ricks had showed him when he arrived.

  “Looks corrugated,” Schwarz said. “They making stealth jets out of cardboard?”

  “What they’re using is a little better,” Grimaldi said. “This is what my friends have figured out—through some quick material analysis. This is ceramic matrix composite or CMC. It’s a crystalline structure used to make a carbon fiber–reinforced carbon material.

  “It’s not unique as a class of materials. They use them to make high-performance braking systems, space shuttle parts, other very high temperature applications needing thermal stability and fracture resistance. But this material, specifically, is s
omething special. We haven’t identified its specific properties yet.”

  Aaron Kurtzman broke in. “We’ve got samples in-house and others going to labs all over the country. All we know thus far is that it is not a cataloged material grade. I’m confident we’ll find it is the source of the stealth properties.”

  “But there’s more to it than that,” Grimaldi said. “What’s so unusual is that whoever produces these aircraft actually used this rigidized CMC compound material as the structural foundation of the entire aircraft.” Grimaldi picked at the part and came away with a few tufts of beige fabric. “They start with a molded plastic shell of the aircraft—fuselage, wings and all—and adhere this on the outside of it. The exterior is then a foamed thermoplastic shell, probably molded on top of the material. It’s a semitranslucent light-absorbing plastic that gives it the ability to actually reflect the colors of the environment. The interior is a thin layer of an engineered material, molded around a capillary liquid storage system. And that’s the gas tank. This aircraft has miles of it—strong plastic tubing built into the body of the aircraft.”

  “We know just how innovative that is,” Carl Lyons said.

  “It would be innovative if it weren’t extremely dangerous,” Grimaldi reported. “On the one hand it allows for maximized interior space with a massive dispersed fuel storage tank. I bet they could double the fuel tank and the range of this jet using this technique. Because the fuel is dispersed throughout the body of the vehicle, the capillary feed could easily be designed to keep the weight constantly balanced, front to back. That helps with stability. All that’s outweighed by the danger, if you ask me. Put a hole in the wall and all of a sudden you have avionics fuel leaking into your plane.”

  “So that’s the purpose?” Barbara Price asked. “For range?”

  “Weight is another factor. All that plastic makes it very lightweight. Too lightweight to control safely, I’d wager,” Grimaldi said. “Very low mass means reduced inertia on the runway. You get takeoffs and landings in world-record short distances.”

  “All this sounds too good to be true,” Schwarz said. “Except for the extreme danger.”

  “Maybe, but you know what? I think that the reason was cost,” Grimaldi said. “Once they figured out the stealth capability I think the entire design was driven by the need to make it dirt cheap to manufacture. I’ve seen Happy Meal toys with more structural integrity that this aircraft would have. This thing is molded out of cheap plastic, assembled with cheap parts. The fuselage, including the wings, are manufactured as one huge molded plastic part so they don’t have to use expensive alloy connection components. The light weight also allows the use of these small, quiet turbofans. They’re made just as cheaply as the aircraft itself. Sure, they’re quiet, and they are powerful enough to make this aircraft maneuverable, but I give them a useful lifetime of maybe ten thousand hours. After that you can’t even fix them. You have to buy a new one.”

  “That seems to sum up the entire aircraft,” Barbara Price said. “It’s quiet and stealthy and invisible to radar, but it’s essentially disposable. And it would only be used by people with disposable lives, quite frankly. A flying death trap.”

  “But it’s a bargain,” Schwarz said.

  Kurtzman said, “So the aircraft body itself can be made inexpensively, as can the engines. What about the controls?”

  “More off-the-shelf components in the controls,” Grimaldi said. “They’re not designed for use in aeronautics. They are not tested to that kind of reliability. The programming—we can’t know about the programming. Judging by cockpit, this thing is programmed and engineered to fly with video-game skills. Almost anybody should be able to do it. There must have been some custom software that got all these components to work together as a system. Frankly, if the electronic control firmware was put together with the same level of expertise as the hardware, then I’m surprised these things aren’t diving out of the sky when someone pushes the wrong button in the cockpit.”

  “Who in the world would buy aircraft like these?” Blancanales asked.

  “Any drug runner in the world would salivate to get their hands on them,” Lyons said. “These are not the kinds of people who put a lot of value on their coworkers’ lives, if you know what I mean. If they can get their hands on a jet that is virtually guaranteed to get past border security, fly into the United States unnoticed by the DEA, with the ability to strike at a rival gang with impunity, and all for a bargain price? Why not?”

  “There are three selling points, if you ask me,” Grimaldi said. “Stealth, price and usability. We know they’re stealthy. The remains suggest they’re cheap to make and sell. The simplistic cockpit suggests they’re made to be easy to fly. Somewhere there’s a factory that is cranking these things out, fast and furious, all exactly the same, all dangerous as hell.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ali Zordun had lived with the stench of burned plastic for so long he didn’t even smell it anymore. His assistant, however, wore a mask to work and constantly complained of headaches and nausea. She said the fumes were too great.

  His sister—she complained constantly. Someday soon he would transfer her to the factory floor.

  He made no comment as he walked down the hall from his office to his media room to watch his precious video feeds.

  The video feeds were one of the design upgrades that had been made from the original prototype. One of his electronics designers had mentioned that, as long as Zordun was equipping each aircraft with video pickups it would be extremely easy to install a cellular transmitter—very low power, but one that would operate almost constantly. Whenever there was video saved in the nonvolatile memory of the aircraft computer, it would be streamed back to Zordun automatically.

  What was more, it was a simple trick to program the aircraft operating system to run the video pickups constantly—whenever the aircraft was powered up, or even when the motion sensors indicated it was occupied. When the electronics designer had suggested this feature Zordun assumed it would be too expensive. His electronics designer had made a simple case for it. A few extra motion-detection sensors would add almost nothing to the overall cost of the aircraft. A few tweaks to the programming and the power supply took care of the video pickups. A few adjustments to the aircraft operating system meant that the aircraft operator would never know the camera was in operation when its app claimed it was dark.

  He would have a constant stream of video intelligence coming in on the people who bought from him. He thought of it as a way of getting to better know his customers.

  He still wondered if it had been a good idea to have this functionality added to the aircraft. It had, frankly, turned out to be a major distraction for him. He spent too much of his own time tapped into the activities of his customers.

  But he was a hardworking man and he hadn’t taken much time off for himself in years. He looked at it not as work, but as entertainment.

  He was especially entertained by the video of in-air trysts, which were an almost universal trend among his buyers. Once they purchased one of his aircraft, and once they convinced themselves that they could actually fly the thing with the help of its highly automated software and a few flying lessons, the first thing they invariably did was have sexual relations on board while the plane flew in autopilot.

  But much of the real intelligence garnered from the video feeds had long-term, marketable value. What could be more potentially valuable than operational evidence from people in highly illegal businesses?

  He had a big market among heroin movers in the Central Asian states and in Southeast Asia. They must have thirty or forty of his planes by now. At least that many again were on order.

  Even some Afghans had found the wherewithal to come up with the three-quarters of a million dollars for one of his planes. Several of them had portrayed themselves as drug smugglers, but had turned out to be in far different businesses.

  There were several cowboy Australians whose careers consisted of
flying cocaine and marijuana into and out of Sydney, mostly from the outback or from routes through Indonesia. These cowboys liked the fact that their aircraft came equipped with video cameras, and they loved the idea of recording their own dramatic flights, and burning them to DVD to impress the women.

  Of course, they did not realize that those video streams were also transmitted back to Zordun.

  Someday he would use them. For now, they were simply his private entertainment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It happened again. David McCarter came out of a nap in the uncomfortable seat of the transport jet with the odd feeling that they’d just changed direction. Jack Grimaldi had left them, returning to the United States to help Stony Man make sense of the jet remains acquired by Able Team. The Phoenix Force flight was being piloted by two United States Air Force pilots on loan to the Farm.

  The monitor and workspace at the front of the jet had come to life with an alert. There was an incoming call from Stony Man Farm.

  Barbara Price appeared on the screen as the others gathered around the worktable.

  “Where are we headed?” McCarter asked.

  “Southeast Asia,” Barbara Price said.

  “I thought maybe we forgot something in Buenos Aires,” Encizo muttered.

  Price didn’t hear him. “We’ve got a lead on the source of these aircraft.”

  “And it is not in South America?” Calvin James asked.

  “The attacks have been escalating worldwide, not just in South America,” Price said. “The number of attacks blamed on stealth aircraft now exceeds two hundred, in fact. But the stakes have just become much higher.”

  On the right-hand side of the screen, a small window opened up of its own accord, showed a small fighter jet, almost invisible against a cloudy sky.

  “This was taken fifty miles from a Chinese air force testing ground by an undercover U.S. operative. This operative is looking into Chinese industrial espionage that has nothing to do with aircraft. But she happened to catch this photo and transmitted it to a contact in the CIA. This happened approximately four hours ago. She reported that the aircraft descended to within two hundred feet of her position outside a small village near her manufacturing district. She said that there was no noise coming from the aircraft, and that it was virtually invisible to the naked eye.”