“Silence that damn thing already, Chung.”
Dai moved his right hand on throttle one and pulled it back all the way, and then lifted it up and back. By doing that, he shut down the electrical connections to the engine, including the fuel pump, securing the engine completely. He adjusted the other throttles to make up for the loss of power on the left side of the aircraft. It was not a nightmare for a large multiengine aircraft to lose an engine, but it was a big deal to hit a bird and have it fail without knowing what type of damage it caused. Plenty of aircraft hit birds annually and most aircrews survived. In the United States alone, bird strikes caused $1.2 billion in damage to commercial aircraft each year.
“Engine is out, Dai. I know there is no way to tell from here, but I heard more than one thump hitting the jet. We may have taken a flock of birds to the fuselage… or even the left wing,” Chung said.
“Understand. Let me do a few maneuvers here at altitude. I’m going to… slow her down, check the controllability. We’re at a good landing gear and flaps speed, so let’s lower the gear and see what we have,” Dai replied.
Chung checked the airspeed indicator, and it read below 220 knots. He moved his hand up to lower the landing gear with the handle, waited a moment, then put the flaps at 50 percent. They flew the aircraft around at three thousand feet above ground level, and it flew fine. Ops normal.
“Put flaps to 100 percent,” Dai commanded.
Chung put the flaps down, and the aircraft pitched as it normally did, but they had no issues either in that configuration. He banked left and right, no issues. Started a descent, and no issues.
“All right, let’s clean her up. Gear and flaps up, and we’ll take her down to 1,500 feet and get dirty down there.”
Chung raised the gear and flaps, as Dai began the descent. He did a standard rate of descent of five hundred feet per minute, just to take it easy. Certainly, Black Scorpion was capable of diving at the deck with a purpose, but this wasn’t the night for that.
The gear and flaps came down again normally as they got to 1,500 feet for a five-mile straight-in approach, and they worked themselves into the landing pattern without their lights on. They didn’t talk to anyone on the aviation frequencies, and they did not show up on the approach controller’s screens. The runway was dark, with no commercial air traffic on their on-board radar.
Their night-vision goggles, or NVGs, were in the infrared light spectrum and allowed them to see clear as day as they approached the airport on short final. The NVGs were optoelectronic devices that allowed images to be produced in levels of light approaching total darkness and showed in shades of green to the pilots. On the electromagnetic spectrum, infrared was 700nm to 1 mm on wavelength, and 430 THz to 300 GHz on the frequency range. Their Generation III devices attached to their helmets and moved on a hinge over their eyes, consisted of an imagine intensifier tube, telescopic lenses, and an infrared illuminator, and they easily allowed them to roll to a safe landing.
They came off the runway and taxied to the empty ramp where the advance maintenance crew was waiting for their arrival. The sound of the jet was more like a roar with a forceful grumble. It easily made your insides vibrate, and you not only saw the jet, but your whole body felt it. It was completely dark outside still, but even under the cover of darkness, Dai and Chung could see the excitement from the taxi director pointing at the left side of their aircraft.
“What’s he pointing at?” Chung asked.
They shut down the remaining three engines using the checklists and sat in the seats doing all the usual post flight items. The hatch levers from below that allowed entry into the cockpit were noisy as the fully enclosed cockpit opened up to the outside world, fresh air flowing in. The maintenance crew climbed up the ladder from the ground and came up and into the jet. Dai also took a good look outside his left window, and saw a gathering of maintenance and engineering folks.
“Well, that’s one hell of a family of birds you hit,” a maintenance guy said as he stood in the cockpit.
“We figured. Sucked into the engine. We lost engine number one in the descent to land,” Chung replied, casually.
“You did? Heck, I wasn’t even talking about that. You have half a goose stuck in the middle of your left wing, and another open gash where the wing meets the fuselage… size of a large softball. I’m talking a hole this big,” he said as he held his hands up. “Some severe damage from hitting a few birds, actually. You’re lucky you didn’t lose the entire aircraft. Damaged the exterior of the wing pretty good.”
Both Dai and Chung looked at each other strangely, then unstrapped and got out of the jet to look. They saw the crowd of ground folks all holding flashlights up to the wing, who now looked at them instead of the aircraft, attempting to gauge their reaction.
Dai and Chung looked at the left wing themselves, then at each other. “Shèng shǐ,” they said in unison, which was “holy shit” in Chinese.
The chief engineer came stomping over. “What the hell is this?” he said, waving his arms around, glaring at the two pilots. “Aw! Chen is going to be fuming,” as he spit on the ground.
There was no one around, so Emily sat at her desk, and Ford pulled up a chair to look over her shoulder to read the screen. It was only a moment before the rest of the team showed up.
Mark stood in their cubicle space, while everyone else sat. Ford and Emily were present, as well as Robert. “Let’s get started. Old Man Burns wants some speed on this and would like to meet again soon. This op will now be known as Operation SANDY BEACH and…”
“Why SANDY BEACH?” asked Ford, interrupting.
“Stop being a pain in the ass, kid. Let me continue.”
“So, SANDY BEACH will consist of us doing a full scrub of all options to present to Mr. Burns. All ideas are on the table. He first wants a complete brief on the status of the Chinese air forces, so I’ll contact one of the senior executives who runs China upstairs, and he can brief that. We’ll take a look at the entire spectrum of data we have available on just our op and present the recommendation to him for decision.”
“Well, there should only be one decision,” Ford stated right out of the gate.
“We don’t even have all the facts, Ford. We can’t make a recommendation yet,” said Robert.
“We have enough, Robert. Laser or not, we know the jet exists.” Most likely, he silently thought. “Evidence is there. Chen and crew lifted, or stole, the technology from us. We know this for a fact. Wu confirmed it. Bottom line is we go get the jet.”
Mark nodded. “Thank you, Ford. I do think we are in a good position again. I agree 100 percent we must do something, and I have an early plan in the works. We just don’t know if they know that we are on to them. Let me start by going around the team here, starting with Robert. What items did you find since we last met? You have something hot?”
Robert sat up in his black, wheeled chair and cleared his throat. “So, the medical folks up at Fort Detrick discovered that there was a DNA request made for the two airdropped bodies we organized during the Devil Dragon heist. The request was made by Chen’s military aide, First Lieutenant Bai Keung. What’s particular about the request is that a military aide-de-camp really only does what his boss asks. That tells us Chen wants to verify the two airdropped decoy bodies are indeed the Devil Dragon pilots. It may have bought us some time, pulling this old-school World War II stunt, but in a matter of time, Chen will know some of the truth.”
“Shite,” Emily said, surprised. “That means we have to hurry. If he starts an investigation, we could get caught. We may have missed something along the way that Chen could discover.”