There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars…
Luke 21:25
Ladd Army Airfield, Fort Wainwright, Alaska
The plane taxied down the runway shortly after midnight, a departure planned well in advance to time the mission with the approaching solar storm. Five minutes before his own takeoff, a brace of F-22 Raptors soared high into the troposphere and vectored toward the Bering Sea, a distraction intended to keep any Russian lookouts busy while the real mission was underway. Captain Justin Roberts checked his instruments and flew north, and the Alaskan interior passed thirty thousand feet below as he flew toward the Chukchi Sea.
His aircraft, a seventh-generation fighter, had been disassembled at its black site in the Nevada desert and shipped by rail, then by sea, to Elmendorf Air Base, where the plane had been reassembled for a night journey to Wainwright. Roberts had stayed with the crate for the entire trip, guarded by very fit men with mustaches and automatic weapons. Darrell made the same trip six months ago, he thought.
“Falcon one-five,” his radio crackled to life. “Status report.”
“Control, this is Falcon one-five. I will be over the area of operations in…” Roberts did a quick calculation in his head. Just under a thousand kilometers at approximately twenty-five hundred kilometers per hour… “Twenty-four minutes.”
“Roger Falcon one-five. See anything yet?”
“Negative, Control – nothing on my screen.”
Under different circumstances, he might have added a bit of silliness – no flying saucers, no little green men – but it was no laughing matter. Darrell Moore had been the best man in their unit, an experienced combat pilot at the tail-end of a twenty-year career. One year ago, Darrell Moore had been sent to Alaska with a prototype aircraft, an unarmed high-altitude surveillance plane.
“What do you think Justin? Aliens?” Their last words had been spoken at a bar in Vegas as they drank beer and watched tourists play the slot machines.
“No.” Roberts, who had a mechanical engineering degree from Pitt, hadn’t even needed to pull out his calculator. “Speed of light’s a hard boundary, and our nearest neighbor is four light-years away. Fastest man-made object is the Parker Solar Probe, which only goes 0.06% of light speed. At that rate, you’d need sixty-five years to make a one-way trip.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they live a lot longer than we do, and sixty-five years is an afternoon drive for them.”
“Anything’s possible, but I’ll put my money on Einstein.”
“Einstein was a smart fella.” Darrell ordered another round. “But he wasn’t infallible. There could be plenty of things out there that we don’t know yet.”
Three months into the mission, America’s most advanced surveillance plane had vanished in a fireball over the Beaufort Sea, and Darrell Moore had vanished with it. Roberts’s own briefing, conducted deep underground at Groom Lake, had been painfully short on detail, and most of his questions had elicited the same three-word answer – “That’s classified information.” His only actionable intelligence related to timing and armaments.
“We know that it’s tied to solar activity, and NASA forecasts a forty percent chance of another big solar storm in the next twelve weeks. You’ll be flying the Falcon, and you’ll be carrying Eagle Claw as your armament package.”
And here I am. Falcon was the project designator for his current airframe, an advanced fighter so secret that the public was unlikely to see one for another twenty years. Eagle Claw was something else entirely, a pair of AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missiles developed in 2017 for long-range air to air combat. The difference, his briefing explained, was in the warheads. “Unlike the high-explosives used for most encounters between aircraft, Eagle Claw substitutes a specialized package…”
That’s one way of putting it, Roberts thought. Each missile was tipped with a 50-kiloton tactical warhead, and if he fired both, Roberts would unleash about ten times the explosive power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. An airburst fired from a fighter jet was a dicey proposition, and if he had to launch for any reason, Roberts figured that his own odds of survival were questionable.
“Control, I’m over the target area. Can you advise…” Roberts frowned as he realized the radio had gone dead.
A hundred stories flashed through his mind, mostly from pilots that flew over remote areas. “Moved with amazing speed… Entered the water without slowing down… Right-angle turn that would have killed a human pilot… Gained seventy-thousand feet of altitude in a matter of seconds.” The briefing had contained one final tidbit of useful information – Darrell Moore had lost all radio contact within one minute of the explosion.
Lights, a gorgeous swirl of blue and green flashed about the plane as the solar storm reached peak intensity. Roberts felt a momentary sensation of panic when he realized that his targeting computer was dead, but the plane’s avionics and visuals continued to function – he could fly and he could see, and that was enough. He pushed the plane into a steep dive as the shape hurtled from the stratosphere, and though the ensuing turbulence left him shaken, it missed his wing by a good hundred meters. The afterburners carried him westward for twenty miles, and Roberts pulled the plane into a wide looping turn as he armed the missiles. He checked the status of the cockpit’s voice recorder.
“Control, this is Falcon One, I don’t think you’re receiving me, but I hope you get this message if I don’t survive. Launching now.”
The dragon spread its wings, readying another charge, as Roberts released the missiles.
Great story. Nice twist there at the end!
Awesome, was definitely not expecting that!