Drilling a hole through Bai’s head with his eyes, he said nothing and let out a long sigh.
Bai knew if they were at one of their many airports, this would be a disaster of a conversation — more like a one-way conversation where Bai listened and Chen yelled and threw items across the hangar or office, with history repeating itself. He was thankful as a junior officer that they were at the Roosevelt House in a public setting, especially with the rest of China’s leadership, which saved his own butt from an ass chewing.
Chen coughed loudly, then spit out his green phlegm onto the ground. It was the size of a quarter and made a wet splat sound when it landed on the balcony floor. “I want to know… I want to know when they are due to land. Find out, now. Am I clear?”
Zeke Ziehmann and Smitty Montoya both had their night-vision goggles down from their flight helmets and spotted the Black Scorpion on the horizon. She was the only jet in that area it seemed, and although the radar didn’t show her, the pilots both pointed with their finger.
“Stevens,” Zeke said over the B-2 intercom. “Wherr yuh-at, Scorpion? Pretty sure we have your jet. Twelve o’clock at four miles, couple hunnerd above us.”
“Wait, I don’t even see him yet,” Smitty said.
Zeke turned a full ninety degrees to give the stare to Smitty. “By over there, Smitty. Come on. You ain’t from Shicago, are ya? Pay attention.”
Ford stood up in the cockpit from his cot, placed both hands on the pilots’ seats, and leaned down to look out the front window. He wasn’t wearing any goggles, so he couldn’t see anything in the dark sky. Ford went back to the laptop to verify.
“Yup, that’s her. I can see on the map here on the laptop.”
“Stevens, yer son of a bitch! Yer made it. Cool. Have yer girl back in DC shut off her IR strobes. Will make it easier for us to intercept, plus verify that’s our bird,” Zeke told Ford.
Ford started typing a message to Jeanie and replied back verbally. “Wilco.”
“Keep the jet’s position lights on, though. We want to fly loose formation with the jet, not run inna her,” Zeke said, thinking of pilot mishaps he had known throughout his flying career where pilots couldn’t see each other.
Aircraft lighting was used for identifying the aircraft from both the air and ground, not necessarily for a pilot to see the ground. There were landing lights to help see the runway in the final phase of flight, but in this cruise phase of flight, only two sets of lights were used: a white strobe light that flashed on and off, and red and green wing-tip lights for position.
Zeke smiled. “Whatta yer know, Stevens? Your bird’s external lighting just went out for a few seconds, den came back on. Contact. Get control of her on your liddle laptop and you’ll have da lead.”
Jeanie was still flying the stealth jet remotely, as the United States had done for so many millions of flight hours before. Whether it was an F-4 Phantom drone or a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper or an RQ-4 Global Hawk, the country was getting quite good at unmanned flying from a remote console of some type.
The transfer of flight controls was as simple as Jeanie clicking a button, the same process used for transfer of a Reaper between Creech Air Force Base and someplace on the other side of the world. For Reapers, a pilot did the takeoff and landing/recovery at the local airfield, and the airborne flying stuff was done from Nevada. It was done thousands of times a day, and today was no different.
Jeanie saw the jet approaching the DAKID intersection, the invisible crossing of two airborne highways off W-174 that made a latitude and longitude point on a map.
She glanced down at the Peanut app box and typed: “YOU READY?”
A response came back from Ford immediately: “YES. LET’S DO THIS.”
Jeanie uncrossed her legs and crossed them again as she moved the mouse with her right hand, staring at her screens. She saw Ford’s laptop computer and clicked on it, and his computer icon was now illuminated.
With that one move, the signal was sent from her computer and across the fiber optics, zooming across the earth, to the satellites, to the B-2. Jeanie let out a breath as her icon turned red and Ford’s turned green.
“Good to go. Positive connection,” she said out loud.
The green light was satisfying to Jeanie because it meant Ford had the flight controls and there was a positive transfer. He now had 100 percent of the operational capability to do all flight maneuvers remotely from his laptop, and the connection for Jeanie was terminated.
The drawback of the red light on her computer meant that she could no longer see the jet on the map, follow Ford’s movements such as direction, attitude, or airspeed, or track to him onto Bangalore. The connection was permanently terminated, a drawback of the system.
“Godspeed, Ford.”
Jeanie’s cyber work was now complete.
Bai was on his smartphone listening but could not believe what he was just told. He was having trouble comprehending what he was hearing and stared down at the ground in silence. Standing in the hallway near the bathroom in a daze, he took the phone off his ear and walked briskly inside the men’s room. Bai then threw up all over the counter and sink, dinner and stomach acid covering the immaculately clean white marble.
He had salvia and stomach acid hanging on his chin while his dry heaving could be heard by other men in the locked stalls.
“Chief, hang on. Hang on,” Bai told him, wiping his mouth with a paper towel. Holy crap, he thought. “How sure are you about this, Chief?”
The maintenance chief talked off Bai’s ear for a solid three minutes, and all Bai could say was to moan in agreement. Others passed by Bai, now out of the bathroom and standing in the hallway. He turned his body so no Chinese generals would see his face.
“You must tell General Chen at once,” announced the maintenance chief.
“What do you think, Stevens?” Zeke asked from up front in the B-2. “Pretty easy to fly?”
“Control inputs are the same as the sim at Creech. I can see everything pretty well on this screen. Fuel numbers are good, airspeed and power settings check. Moving map has us landing in Bangalore in eighteen minutes. Match with what you’re seeing?”
Smitty shook his head up and down and gave a thumbs-up to Zeke from across the cockpit.
“Yup. Ol’ Smitty here just gave yer a thumbs-up,” replied Zeke.
Ford and the B-2 crew verified the weather, NAVAIDS, and landing data, and briefed up the instrument approach into Yelahanka Bangalore.
“Obviously I can’t see out the window for a visual approach, so as planned, shoot the ILS to the west for landing. I’m tuned up back here and have positive ID. I’ll continue the lead, and, sir, perhaps you just follow the Black Scorpion in for a low pass. I’ll stop her off the taxiway until you land behind me and full stop. Good?”
The B-2 pilots were listening and preparing their own jet to land. Ford was in his old Devil Dragon checklists, too, using the flight manual they took when obtaining that jet not too long ago. It was a risk to take, making an educated guess that the jets were identical, or close to it, but it was all they had.
Ford, sensing a lull in the descent, waved his wings a bit and changed direction a few degrees to fool around, partly to have some fun, and partly to see if the two pilots up front were paying attention. He was quietly laughing.
“Stevens. Nice try. You don’t think we see ya doin’ your liddle wing-waggle out there?”