“Few more minutes.”
“How can he accomplish an entire systems preflight in just a few minutes?”
“How long does it take you to wake up from a nap?” J.C. told him as he put the finishing touches on the preflight he had begun long before. “How long does it take you to ask yourself how you feel? That’s what ANTARES is like. If something was wrong with DreamStar, Ken would feel it just like he’d feel a sprained ankle or a crink in his neck.”
Where Ken had banks of computers to check his avionics, J.C. manually had to “fail” a system to check a backup system, or manually deflect Cheetah’s control stick and have the wing flex checked by a crew chief to verify the full range of motion of the fighter’s elastic wings. But after a few minutes of setting switches and checking off items in a checklist strapped to his right thigh, he was ready to go.
Patrick keyed his microphone: “Storm Control, this is Storm One flight. Two birds in the green. Ready to taxi.”
General Elliott was now on top of Dreamland’s portable control tower, a device fifty feet high that was set up and taken down for each mission to confuse attempts by spy satellites to pinpoint Dreamland’s many disguised dry-lakebed runways. Major Hal Briggs had just come up the narrow winding stairs and handed Elliott another computer printout when Patrick made his call.
“Those Cosmos peeping Toms start their first pass over the range in fifteen minutes,” Briggs said. “They’ve got our test time scoped out almost to the minute. Those satellites will be overhead every fifteen minutes for the next two hours — exactly as long as this scheduled mission.”
“Another damned security leak. And I scheduled this mission only two days, ago.”
“But those spy birds weren’t up there two days ago,” Briggs said. “I checked. You mean—?”
“I mean the Soviets took only two days — maybe less — to launch two brand new satellites just for this test flight,” Elliott said. “Well, at least they won’t catch our planes on the ground.” He picked up his microphone. “Storm Flight, this is Alpha. Taxi to hold point and await takeoff clearance. Winds calm, altimeter …” Elliott checked the meteorological data readouts on an overhead console “… three-zero-zero-five. Taxi clearance void time is one-zero minutes. Over.”
“Storm Flight copies ten minutes. On the move.” Moments later both fighters emerged from the satellite bluff and fell in behind a jeep with a large sign that read “FOLLOW ME.” The caravan moved quickly across an expanse of hard-baked sand to another smaller satellite-bluff hangar that had been towed out to the end of one of the disguised runways that crisscrossed Groom Lake in the center of the Dreamland test range. Now Cheetah and DreamStar pulled alongside each other and set their parking brakes while technicians and specialists did a fast last-chance inspection of each.
“Pre-takeoff and line-up checks,” Patrick said over interphone.
“Roger,” J.C. replied. “In progress.”
“Storm Two ready for release,” James suddenly radioed in.
“Amazing,” Patrick said to J.C. “He’s already done with a pre-takeoff checklist twice as complicated as ours.” He keyed the UHF radio switch. “Standby, Storm Two.”
“Roger.”
“MAW switch set to V-sub-X, max performance takeoff.” J.C. read off the most critical switch positions for the mission-adaptive-wing mode, and Patrick saw that the leading and trailing edges of the wings had curved into a long, deep high-lift airfoil.
“Canard control and engine nozzle control switches set to ‘AUTO ALPHA,’ “ J.C. continued. “This will be a constant-alpha takeoff.” J. C. Powell always briefed his back-seater on the takeoff, abort, and emergency procedures, even though he and Patrick had flown together for almost two years and Patrick knew the procedures as well as J.C. “Power to military thrust, brakes of and power to max afterburner. We’ll expect negative-Y push after five seconds, with a pitch to takeoff attitude. After that we monitor angle-of-attack throughout the climb and make sure we don’t exceed twenty-eight alpha in the climb-out. I’m looking to break my previous record of a seventeen-hundred-foot takeoff roll on this one … In case we don’t get the push-down I’ll cancel auto-alpha and switch to normal takeoff procedures — accelerate to one-sixty, rotate, maintain eight alpha or less, accelerate to two-eight-zero knots indicated and come out of afterburner. Same procedures if we lose vectored thrust after takeoff … All right.” Powell slapped his gloved hands together, finished off the last few items of the checklist: “Circuit breakers checked. Caution panel clear. Canopy closed and locked. Seat belts and shoulder harnesses?”
“On and on,” Patrick intoned.
“Checked up front. Lights set. Helmets, visors, oxygen mask, oxygen panel.”
“On, down, on, set to normal.”
“Same here. Parking brakes released.” J.C. touched a switch on his control stick. “Takeoff configuration check.”
“Takeoff configuration check in progress,” responded a computer-synthesized voice. It was the final step in Cheetah’s electronics array. A computer, which had monitored every step of the pre-takeoff checklists being performed, would make one last check of all systems on board and report any discrepancies.
“Takeoff configuration check complete. Status okay.”
“I already knew that, you moron,” J.C. murmured to the voice. He never relied on the computerized system although he consulted it. It was, as he would frequently remind everyone within earshot, another computer out to get him. “We’re ready to go, Colonel,” he said.
Patrick keyed the radio switch. “Storm Control, this is Storm flight of two. Ready for departure.”
Hal Briggs, on the narrow catwalk of the portable tower, spoke four words into a walkie-talkie. “Sand storm, one-seven.”
His cryptic message activated a hundred security officers spread out within some four-hundred square miles of the takeoff area. They were the last line of defense against unauthorized intrusion or eavesdropping on the test that was about to begin. Each man checked and rechecked his assigned sector with an array of electronic sensors — sound, radar, heat, motion, electromagnetic — and once secure, reported an “all secure” by sending a coded electronic tone. Only when all of the tones were received would a “go” signal be sent to Briggs.
Five seconds later he received that coded tone. “Good sweep, General,” he reported to Elliott. The general took one last look at the satellite overflight schedule, picked up the mike:
“Storm flight of two, clear for unrestricted takeoff. Winds calm. Takeoff clearance void time, five minutes. Have a good one.”
Patrick hit a switch, and the faint hum of the big gyrostabilized video camera mounted on Cheetah’s spine could be heard. “Camera’s slaved on DreamStar, J.C.,” he said. “Don’t lose him.”
“A cold day in hell before any machine can outrun me.”
They saw DreamStar taxi a few feet forward just ahead of Cheetah, until the tip of DreamStar’s forward-swept right wing-tip was just cutting into J.C.’s view of Ken James.
“Comin’ up,” J.C. said. He brought the throttles forward, keeping his toes on the brakes. Cheetah began to quiver, then shake with a sound like the distant rumble of an earthquake.
“Turn ‘em loose, baby,” J.C. murmured. He scanned his engine-instrument readouts on the main display, running down the graphic displays of engine RPM, fuel flow, nozzle and louver position, turbine inlet temperature and exhaust gas temperature. Each bar graph lined up in the normal range, everything right smack in the green — both engines in full military power, one hundred and nine percent of rated thrust, sixty thousand pounds of power. His grip on the stick and throttles unconsciously tightened. “Turn ‘em loose …”