Kara, Hail and Gage heard Foster yell, “I’m gonna getcha,” and then he laughed in a maniacal fashion.
“No, not this time,” Alex yelled back. All three of the simulators tilted nose down on gyroscopic mounts, as Taylor and Alex went into a vertical dive to avoid Foster getting a weapons lock on them. The three simulators rolled crazily, once, then twice, before leveling back into horizontal flight. The sharp sound of a weapons lock sounded, and Foster called out, “Gotcha,” as he squeezed the trigger on his stick.
Down below, the audience watched a simulated LOCO rocket leave the wing of Foster’s F-35, and a moment later, it sheered the wing off Taylor’s F-35. She let out a scream of frustration. Her simulator screens went black, and the hydraulic lift supporting her machine began to lower toward the deck below. But Alex was still in the fight. Or to be precise, at that precise moment, he was in the process of fleeing. He was running balls-out on full afterburner from the experienced pilot.
Alex pulled back on his control yoke and shot towards the blinding sun, trying his best to lose Nolan. The physical orientation of his simulator changed, and he
was now pointing straight up with the full weight of his body pressed back into his seat. The simulated sun was so bright on the monitors that the observers who were watching below had to look away and back toward the physical machines, as they mimicked their real-life F-35 counterparts.
Now, the lieutenant commander was lying back in his seat, his simulator pointed skyward. The back end of Alex’s jet was in plain view. Even though they were going straight up, the airspeed indicators were still climbing. Their altitude gauges were spinning up like possessed digital clocks, but Alex still refused to pull out of the vertical climb.
“Where are you going?” Foster called out. “To the moon?” he asked, laughing.
Then warning sounds began beeping in Alex’s F-35. Foster pulled out of the climb, flipped over and went into a steep dive. At first, Alex didn’t know what was happening. He checked the warnings and realized that his right engine had flamed out. He didn’t know why, and as he considered going through the engine restart routine, his other engine coughed, shuddered and died as well. The busy altimeter gauge came to a dead stop before it began rolling backwards, and Alex’s F-35 fell from the sky. Around and around his simulator rolled, as the electric motors and hydraulics simulated a jet in a flat fall from 60,000 feet. Alex tried going through the complex restart procedures, but the tumbling was too disorienting for him to operate his controls. Instead of trying to save his aircraft, and vomiting in the process, he reached down and pulled the ejection handle under his seat. Instantly, the simulated sound of wind, the computerized rolling of his aircraft, and the insistent blaring of fake alarms, came to a stop. His simulator leveled off and the thick hydraulic cylinders lowered his pod slowly to the ground.
Foster Nolan found a button that was not part of the F-35 flight controls labeled END SIMULATION and pressed it. His simulator capsule came to a stop and lowered to the ground. All three combatants unhooked their five-point harnesses, got out of their form-fitting flight chairs and left through the back door of their simulator capsules.
Foster was all smiles in direct contrast to the teens’ pouts. The young pilots were dressed in thin black flight suits, or coveralls, without the air bladders and pneumatics that real flight suits had. Those special features were designed to compress the pilot’s lower extremities to push blood back up to the brain. Other than flipping this way and that, there were no g forces induced in the simulator; hence, there was no need for g-force suits.
As the trio walked toward the group standing on the deck, Foster was yammering at Alex, “You have to watch your gauges and know the limitations of
your aircraft. Over 50,000 feet, and on full afterburner, there is not enough air at that altitude for your engines to breathe. That’s why they flamed out.”
Alex said nothing, but he looked equally pissed as he appeared embarrassed.
Hail gave the three pilots a fatherly smile as they came to a stop in front of him.
“So, how is it going up there in the clouds?” Hail asked.
Alex huffed, “Not so good. Flying an F-35 in a dogfight against the lieutenant commander is a lot different than flying against the computer or each other.”
“Hey, don’t feel bad,” Nolan told him. “I had years of training in flight tactics. Just a couple of days in the simulator and watching Top Gun a dozen times won’t make you a fighter pilot. But you guys have great skills. You’ll get there.”
“See,” Hail said. “the lieutenant commander will turn you into Navy pilots in no time. Then, I guess you’ll be off to join the Navy, right?” Hail asked.
Alex and Taylor knew that their boss was just messing with them, and Alex answered, “I think I will stick to drones. The downside of flying drones is there is no downside. And when I mean down — I mean a long way down — if you know what I mean?”
“Understood,” Hail laughed.
The two teens turned and began walking back toward the simulators.
Hail called out after the young pilots, “Are you going to fly jets some more?”
“Naa,” Alex said without looking back. “Taylor and I are going to play Call of Duty. It’s a lot more fun playing 3D in the simulator than in the game room.”
Alex turned and looked back at Hail. “Don’t forget, Skipper. We have a quarterly committee meeting today at 3:00 p.m.”
“I’ve got it on my calendar,” he told Knox.
Hail turned toward Nolan.
“Can I get a little of your time, Foster?” Hail asked. “We’ve been given a mission — no, make that two missions, and we would like you to be part of the planning team.”
“Sure,” the lieutenant commander smiled, grateful to be part of the team.
Renner, Ramey, Hail and Nolan began walking toward the thick metal door that led to the hallway outside the simulator room. As they walked toward the conference room, Hail began to fill Nolan in on the details.
“How this works with Washington is my crew doesn’t have the intelligence assets to track down the terrorists on the FBI’s Top Ten Terrorists list. Thus, the
CIA supplies my team with information, like the location of people that are not only on their list, but also have a considerable bounty on their heads.”
The Hail Team arrived at a stairwell leading to the upper decks. In single file, they began ascending the stairs to the deck above.
“Why doesn’t the CIA simply take out these bad apples?” Nolan asked, speaking loudly, so he could be heard over feet pounding on metal stairs.
Hail started to respond, but Kara jumped in and said, “There are advantages to having Marshall and his crew taking out these targets. For example, if something goes wrong, it’s not a United States military op discovered on foreign soil, conducting unsanctioned operations in countries it shouldn’t be in. It is Mr. Hail and his organization that gets busted.”
They reached the top of the stairs, turned right and began walking down a long white hallway.
Hail thought that Kara’s explanation required some refinement and added, “But when we go in, we do it without any feet on the ground. We use drones. And when we leave, we leave nothing behind that can be traced back to me or my organization.”
Nolan asked, “And the U.S. military can’t do the same thing?”
Renner responded, “It still comes back to a measure of deniability. The president and her staff would like to see these bad people disappear, but they also want to deny having anything to do with it. There is no paper trail because no U.S. funds are being spent to have these terrorists terminated.”