“Geez. For what? Mark is down on a cruise, on a… on a Royal Caribbean ship water slide near some tropical island. And Ford is flying training missions at Ellsworth.”
“Yeah, we know. Something has come in, and it’s hot. Needs to talk to the team this morning.”
Sigh. “All right, Jason. Robert and I will be up there,” Emily said, then hung up the phone. “Bollocks. What in the bloody hell does he have that’s apparently so hot?”
Robert was sitting at his cubicle and typing away on his computer and could hear Emily talking to Jason. He couldn’t help but overhear and decided to engage to see what was going on. “What is it, Emily?”
“You’ll never believe this. Bugger,” as she paused. She stared off into space, thinking about Ford coming in, checking on her fingernails. Emily was both excited and surprised. She was not sure what Calvin Burns had in store for them, but she would be able to see Ford again. Ford! Emily thought to herself.
“Helloooo? Emily? Are you there? What was the call about?” Robert asked.
“That was Jason ringing. Mr. Burns wants to meet with all of us later this morning. Eleven thirty. Two personnel movements are afoot. Mark was called back from the Caribbean, and Ford is inbound here to DC.”
“Yeah, Mark and Ford? Mark must be furious! Whoo wee,” Robert said laughing.
“You’re not kidding. Stay away from him when he gets here.”
Robert was instantaneously in thought and was rolling through his options. What did Mr. Burns want with Ford? I can understand Mark, but both of them? It was very rare to be recalled back from leave, especially from a cruise ship vacation. Robert interpreted that it must be something big — so big that you needed the entire China Aviation Team together, including the air force pilot. The only one who has ever flown a secret Chinese stealth bomber.
“Ford is coming!” she said happily, clapping her hands like a small girl in a school yard.
Robert, ever stoic and expressionless, looked at Emily.
“Emily. Why? What would Ford get called here for? That’s pretty atypical. You know, pretty odd,” Robert offered. “If he was getting another achievement award, something administrative, it would be handled by the air force. He’s a pilot, out doing pilot stuff. You know, flying.” Robert nodded a bit. “I hate to say this, but there is only one reason he is coming back. And there is only one reason that Mark would get recalled off a cruise ship.”
Emily did not know how to take it at first and ran through a few items in her head. Nothing immediately came to mind. “What reason? What reason, Robert?” Emily asked. “I don’t understand.” She thought about it, and it still wasn’t clicking. She had no clue why they would be recalled. She turned her head sideways in thought.
“Emily. Come on,” Robert said in his low but deep voice. “You know.”
The both stood staring at each other. The other office people moving and talking in the background were the only sounds around. No one else was in their meeting spaces. A pin could drop, and it would have been heard like a boulder down a hill. They looked into each other’s eyes like a contest as the seconds went by.
Emily pulled her head back and raised her eyebrows toward the ceiling. “OMG,” she blurted out. The idea just hit her. “No kidding? Bloody hell!”
“Yes,” Robert replied, sitting down in his chair and sliding back to his cubicle with some excitement. Emily followed right behind him, leaning over his shoulder to stare at the computer screen.
“Shite! No way! Check the intel updates and see what we have. Wow.” Emily had figured it out. “China. China is flying again. I just know it. Wu was right. Could be dodgy intel, but… that plonker General Chen has more aircraft,” announced Emily with some emotion.
“I agree,” answered Robert, sporting a rare smile, as they both dove into the computers to search for data to validate what they were thinking. They ran a search through the mounds of data, and it was like they were looking for a needle in a haystack.
Two words kept coming back, being repeated in their search, but had no context — not associated to anything they knew of just yet, but they could be important. The words “Black” and “Scorpion” were being highlighted.
“What’s this ‘Black Scorpion’ word trend? Keeps coming up. Repeating,” Robert asked Emily, not expecting a reply. “You ever hear of those words?”
She thought for a jiffy, and then it hit her. “Bollocks. Didn’t Wu mention that? Is that the name of the second aircraft? Check what we have from the Devil Dragon debrief, yes?”
“No country trains only a few pilots. I bet they have a whole crop of smart pilots ready to go. Damn. Why didn’t we think of that earlier?” Robert asked, not expecting an answer.
Emily and Robert turned from looking at the screen to face each other with big smiles, and simultaneously said the same name, the now-famous hothead Chinese air force lieutenant general that led their stealth program: “Chen.”
The U-2 Dragon Lady high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft was conducting a mission out of Guam this morning, assigned by US Indo-Pacific Command (known as INDOPACOM), with its pilot wearing his orange astronaut pressure suit and fully enclosed helmet out of an abundance of safety. The pilot inside had worked his way up the career ladder at i3, the company that held the contract with NASA and the air force for the U-2. Pilot Bobby Anton, a former navy F-14D Tomcat pilot, was originally hired for the C-20 and DC-8 pilot positions, but quickly fell in love with the Dragon Lady and loved being a civilian contract pilot. He first started out helping the U-2 team as a chase car driver, then racked up enough qualified flight hours and trustworthiness to get into the U-2 pilot training program. Before he knew it, he was flying missions all over earth, including today over the Sea of Japan at seventy thousand feet with his radar and lenses to the west toward China.
To climb up to these impressive altitudes, aeronautical engineers in the 1950s had to create something special from just pencils and paper, old-school sheet metal, rivets, and slide rules. The engineers would eventually design one of the most fantastic aircraft ever flown, one that would resemble a glider with thin wings and a jet engine that could get her up to altitude. It couldn’t be too weighty, though, because then the pilots could not get her airborne. It had to be just the right weight so she could rise high in the sky, above most aircraft, and out of reach of enemy surface-to-air missiles. It had to go and do what not that many pilots go and do: conduct high-altitude photography.
Luckily for pilot Bobby Anton, he had trained years ago down at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, the birthplace of all naval aviators, and learned to fly around aircraft carriers for most of his career. Lucky, because the U-2 was one damn tough airplane to fly. Her long, skinny, straight wings were highly efficient and held all the fuel for long, twelve-hour missions. The flight controls were smooth and relaxed to manipulate up at altitude but required a power weight lifter to manhandle the controls during landing and taking off. Most modern aircraft had assistance from engine-powered hydraulics to move ailerons and elevator control surfaces, but in this bird, Bobby Anton only had his triceps and deltoid muscles. The winds for today’s mission were calm enough to make him have confidence during takeoff, but wind that was not down the runway was a wind from hell. Crosswinds were a bear in this flying machine, and one wrong input with the flight controls and you scraped a wing tip. Or worse.