Then she laughed, turned around, and disappeared into the crowd, leaving Hunter frozen to the spot, staring blankly at his hand.
Hunter eventually found Y leaning over his favorite twenty-one table.
He came up beside him just as the dealer was laying out the seven of hearts and the five of clubs before him. Y had a small pile of chips in front of him, three hundred dollars left over from the night before.
He told the dealer to give him a hit. The dealer complied—and the King of Spades flew out of the deck and landed atop the two previous cards. Seven and five and ten make twenty-two.
Y went bust. For the first time in seven days.
He looked up at Hunter, his face partially drained of color.
“Not a good way to start the day,” he said.
Sixteen
HUNTER AND Y GOT to the airport in time and began searching for their assigned departure gate.
It was located at the far end of Love Field, Gate 99, a place isolated from just about everything else. And what they found was not a typical passenger terminal but a storage barn for Global Airways, the poorly concealed front company for the OSS.
Both Hunter and Y groaned upon arrival as they saw a Beater was being pulled out of the hangar for them.
“Do we always have to fly in these things?” Hunter asked the OSS man, his exasperation finally breaking out.
Y was not happy about it either. But he was checking with his MVP, which was now absolutely burning with information after seven days of virtual silence.
The screen was filled with instructions as to what they had to do next. Apparently travel by the Beater was mandatory.
“I guess where we are going,” Y said, “this is the only way to get there.”
They took off thirty minutes later, the Octocopter fighting its way into the air, as they all did, with a disturbing clanking sound.
Once it reached a shaky altitude of 2,500 feet, they turned northwest and began crawling through the low clouds. Hunter and Y strapped down in the forward observation compartment, and were soon fighting off nausea from the engine fumes and the sudden shifts in altitude.
Over the saloons, over the brothels, and over the casinos they flew. Hunter looked down at the party capital of the world and felt a slight tug in his chest.
Something told him that wherever he was going, it would not be one-millionth as exciting as Dallas had been.
It would be a while before he realized how wrong he was.
The Beater flew on for what seemed like hours.
Hopping over mountains, skirting valleys, jumping across entire deserts. Hunter dozed most of the way, his face pressed up against the chopper’s forward observation window, as if he was trying to sleep and watch the earth go by beneath him at the same time.
The trip lasted six long hours. When Hunter finally woke again, Y was nudging him with a cup of coffee. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and looked out at what he’d been missing.
They were still over a desert; Hunter recognized the slightly red tinge to the sand and dust as being indicative of Nevada.
“Good guess,” Yaz told him, routinely reading his mind.
The Beater came up and over one particularly barren mountain range and before them was a vast valley, white as salt. The heat was rising off the desert floor, distorting everything into wavy liquid lines. It looked like a huge lake in the middle of nowhere.
But Hunter could see through this mirage. And what he saw was a collection of low, white buildings located next to a series of mammoth runways. There was nothing else around for miles. By its sheer isolation it was obvious this was a very secret place.
The Beater took another fifteen minutes to slow down, hover, plunge a few terrifying feet, right itself, hover again, and finally set down, with a spine-jarring bump. Hunter just shook his head as he climbed out of the beast. Why the hell did people insist on flying in these pieces of crap?
He and Y left the Beater crew to hose down their smoldering engines and began walking toward the cluster of buildings about a quarter of a mile away. A jeepster approached, squealing to a stop in front of them. A man in a plain, unmarked uniform was at the wheel. He introduced himself as the security officer for the base, then he and Y exchanged clearance information. Once everything was checked out, Hunter and Y climbed into the jeepster and the officer squealed away.
Soon they were speeding along the rock-hard white surface, leaving a storm of white dust in their wake. The officer passed Y a book full of codes and a map. The codes were the electronic combinations for all the doors on all the hangars at the secret base; the map showed where everything was.
In effect, the man was giving Y free run of the place. Not that there was much happening here. Tumbleweeds had literally gathered on the massive runways. Everything looked slightly overgrown. Y expressed surprise at this.
“Where is everybody?” he asked the security man.
“Most of the people stationed here have been called to active duty,” the officer replied. The jeepster’s accelerator was pressed all the way to the floorboard by now. “As for everyone else, we were told to give them the day off.”
They arrived at the cluster of buildings. Hunter and Y climbed out and thanked the man for the ride.
“Let me know if you need anything,” he said with a salute.
They returned the salute and the jeepster squealed away, leaving them in a tiny storm of the powdery sand.
Hunter and Y dusted themselves off and studied their new surroundings.
“So, is this place familiar to you at all?” Y asked him.
Hunter scanned everything. The buildings. The mountains. The obvious top secret status. But most of all, it was those big runways. There were five of them, all were very, very long.
Then it hit him. Of course he knew this place. Back in his world, it was supposedly the most secret air base in the world.
“Area 51,” Hunter blurted out. “Groom Lake …”
Y laughed.
“As usual, you’re right, but all wrong,” he said. He pointed to a sign hanging on the side of a nearby administration building.
It read: “U.S. Air Corps. Bride Lake. Area 52.”
Hunter laughed too.
At least the cosmos had a sense of humor.
There were six streets in all. Most were lined with hangars and support buildings. Several bore pump houses, radio receivers, and long-range radar stations. In an odd way, the alignment of the streets and buildings was similar to the air base up in Iceland from which Hunter had fought the war against Germany, a place nicknamed “Dreamland.” That too had been a secret place of sorts.
Y consulted the map, then punched a few things into his ever-present MVP. A message was soon beamed back to him: Proceed to Hangar #19.
It was about a two-minute walk to the designated air barn. Y had a little trouble at first punching the long combination number into the electronic lock, but eventually he got the access door to spring open. He and Hunter stepped inside.
Hangar #19 wasn’t too big, but it had high walls and a high ceiling. It was also very dark inside. Hunter took a deep sniff. Aviation gas. Oil. Hydraulics fluid. Spilled coffee. Just like every other hangar he’d ever been into. The thickness of the combined odor told him there were about half a dozen airplanes in here.
Y somehow found the lights. He flicked the switch and suddenly Hunter was looking at a room full of aircraft. There were six of them and they were stacked wing to wing in such a way that there was very little room to move about.
And what strange airplanes they were!
“A couple of these were actually built more than ten years ago,” Y said consulting the MVP. “The others much more recently. One thing they did here at Area 52 was test new aircraft designs. A few of these airplanes were being evaluated when everyone left to go fight against Germany. Then the others were being tested when the war with Japan broke out. So now, here they sit.”
One airplane looked to Hunter to be a cross betwee
n an old prop fighter he recalled as being named the P-39 Aerocobra, and a much more updated design for a swing-wing attack jet. The result was a big and bulky, complicated-looking airplane, one that managed to look fast and slow at the same time. Its name, painted on its side in fancy lettering, was Z-5.
“Did this thing ever really fly?” Hunter asked Y.
Y checked the MVP.
“Yep,” he replied. “Exactly twice. Both times it clocked in at more than 2,200 miles an hour.”
Hunter just shook his head. That was more than Mach 3, yet the airplane itself looked like a flying can of crap. Even Y noticed that.
“Think it’s still airworthy?” he asked Hunter.
Hunter just shrugged.
“I hope I don’t have to find out,” he replied under his breath.
Two more planes nearby were even odder. They were very small, diminutive, no bigger than a jeepster. No tail wing, barely a bubble for the canopy. Yet they were jet fighters, with wings loaded down by air-to-ground rockets, and three cannon muzzles sticking from the nose cone.
“Flying hot rods,” Y said. “Official name Z-4 Bantams. Old-timers here. They were one of the original Z-planes.”
“Z-planes?” Hunter asked.
“Sure,” Y replied. “You know, that’s the designation given to planes that are prototypes. Experimental planes….”
Hunter scratched his head.
“Yes, but why wouldn’t you call them X-planes then?”
Y thought for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he finally replied. “Never occurred to anyone, I guess.”
They moved on.
The next four airplanes were very eye-catching. They were smallish, and at first glance, of simple design. Wings, fuselage, normal tail. But their two engines were lined up on either side of the nose, almost parallel with the cockpit. What Hunter quickly realized was that these were actually movable jet nozzles. They were attached to a pivot which could swing down and provide the jet with a powerful blast toward the ground.
“VTOL aircraft?” Hunter exclaimed. “Very cool.”
Y checked his MVP.
“They can take off vertically and fly horizontally,” he said reading a designation statement. “Is that what a VTOL is?”
But Hunter didn’t reply. It was not out of rudeness; he was simply too fascinated with these bizarre aircraft. Like a lot of things in this world, they looked both old and new at the same time. They weren’t fighters; they were too gangling and unstreamlined for that. They were perfect insurgency airplanes. Ground supporters. Mudmovers. Things for which the VTOL aspect was ideal.
The sixth and final plane might have been the most unusual of all. It was bigger than the rest of the others combined. Very long wings—so long they drooped to the hangar floor. Otherwise the plane was normal, or as normal as one in this strange world could be.
“That is a Z-16, prototype for an ultralong-range recon plane,” Y explained, via the MVP. “Apparently it’s absolutely crammed full of long-range navigation gear. The idea was to fly it high over one spot for days at a time and take pictures of the bad guys.”
“Interesting stuff,” Hunter said after they finally reached the other side of the hangar. “Unusual, too.”
Y looked back at the strange gang of airplanes. “That’s an understatement, I think,” he said.
“But now,” Hunter continued. “The question is, what are we supposed to do with all this stuff?”
“Let me find out,” Y said.
He immediately clicked on his MVP. Another screen appeared and Y read it with a shrug.
“It’s telling us to proceed to another area,” he reported. “Not here at Bride Lake. Somewhere farther out in the desert. This thing says the answer will be out there.”
They got ahold of a jeepster and, using directions provided by the MVP, started driving north.
They were soon roaring down a barely paved roadway marked Highway 6. For the next thirty minutes, the road carried them through miles of open desert, around several buttes, and through a few dry washes. Then they went up and over a small mountain. On the other side, off in the distance, they could see their destination: an enormous hangar nuzzled into the side of a blind canyon. The jagged ledges above it made it nearly impossible to see from just about any direction save south.
It was the perfect place to hide something. Something very big.
They made for this place, per instructions from the MVP. But Hunter soon realized that the long, straight-as-an-arrow road they’d picked up at the bottom of the mountain was actually not a road at all. It was a runway. One that was at least ten miles long and ended at the front gate to the huge hangar.
“If whatever is in that barn needs ten miles to take off, I don’t even want to see it,” Hunter said.
“This time I tend to agree with you,” Y replied, looking at the MVP. “But that’s exactly what we’ve been told to do.”
They finally reached the main gate, where they were met by a pair of sentries. These men were attached to the Air Guards, the Air Corps’s infantry wing. They were a bit surprised to see them.
“Are you lost, sir?” one asked Y. “We don’t get many visitors out here.”
Y showed his OSS pass plus one for Hunter and then displayed his orders on the MVP screen. The sentries saluted and they were waved in. Up close, the hangar looked like a gigantic cigarette box. No windows. Two doors. Another pair of guards was stationed at the front door. They too checked their passes and the MVP orders and directed them to a small parking area. Here they left the jeepster.
Y punched the combination into the hangar’s side-access door and this time it opened on the first try. He and Hunter stepped inside, closing the door behind them. The inside of the barn was cold, dark, and extremely dusty. The sentry had been right. This place didn’t get many visitors. Judging by the musty odor, it seemed like no one had been inside the hangar in years.
They walked into the main room and Y somehow found the light switch. Like before, he fumbled a bit and then finally turned it on. The lights flickered once and then stayed on for good.
What stood in front of them now was both startling and slightly unreal.
It was an airplane—and it was a huge one all right. Huge wasn’t the right word—this thing was way bigger than a B-17/36, way bigger than a B-24/52. It was even bigger than a Navy CB-201.
It was enormous. Immense. Colossal.
“Wow,” was all Hunter could say.
Y was speechless.
The monster had wings at least three hundred feet long each. Ten giant reverse contra-prop engines adorned each wing, with an additional four-jet array down near each tip. The fuselage was about 1,000 feet long, and the tail wing assembly probably ten stories high. The giant plane most closely resembled the B-17/36; it bore the nose of a ’36, as well as the wings. Its fuselage actually looked closer to what Hunter knew as the B-29 Superfortress, a late-entry long-range propeller-driven bomber from his version of World War II. But this airplane was a hundred times bigger than what he remembered a B-29 to be.
In this strange world of big, bigger, and biggest aircraft, this one was simply the largest airplane either one of them had ever seen.
“Who in the world built this?” Hunter asked, astounded. “And why?”
Y was already punching buttons on his mission pad to find out. But he read the next set of orders and again was simply left shaking his head.
“It says we have to climb into this thing and look around before we can find out,” Y said.
They did.
If possible, the airplane was stranger inside than out. It was so immense, it actually had a little shuttle car to carry crewmembers the length of the fuselage. The flight deck looked better suited to a battleship. There were seats for six pilots above which the commander of the aircraft sat like a king lording it over his court.
The flight chamber was encased almost totally in Plexiglas. It sat above the nose of the airplane like the huge glassy pupil
of a monstrous one-eyed bug. A four-stop elevator was used to get from this lofty position to the lower chambers.
The fuselage itself was as cavernous as a subway tunnel. It was pockmarked with observation blisters and four sets of catwalks for traveling the sides of the great airship. Once at mid fuselage, Hunter was astonished to see one could walk inside the wings. There were actually small living compartments inside the wing roots, complete with bunks, sinks, heads, and even observation windows.
The long ride to the end of the airplane revealed mountains of tubes and wires and switches and more wires. Sitting in the tail, protected somewhat by a wire mesh enclosure, was a larger than usual Main/AC Battle Management Computer. The interconnected “thinking machine” could be found in one form or another aboard every U.S. Navy warship, Air Corps aircraft, Army tank, jeep, and mobile gun, as well as inside many noncombat sites, from the office of the highest general in the War Department to the cubicle of the lowliest supply clerk.
The Main/AC was everywhere—even in the back of this enormous airplane.
They walked the length of the aircraft again, still astonished at its size. But could it fly? Y didn’t know and Hunter wasn’t asking.
But once they’d reached the forward compartment again, Hunter took another long glance down the interior of the ship and then turned to Y. “OK, I’ll ask again: What exactly do they want me to do with this thing?”
Y pushed some buttons, retrieved his next set of instructions and immediately frowned again.
“Sorry, I can’t tell you yet,” he said. “We’ve got another place to go.”
The MVP had them driving back out into the desert ten minutes later.
The heat was searing now, beating down on them in their unprotected jeepster. But Hunter’s mind was not so much on the sweaty conditions, as it was on what he’d seen here already and the surprise he knew the OSS was laying for him.
The monster airplane was intriguing to him at least—as all things aeronautical were. Back There, if he recalled correctly, the usual process for building military aircraft began in the design stage, then advanced to building several prototypes. The best performing prototype would be selected, and soon, factories would be turning out the new airplane based on this design.
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