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  Black Sky

  William H Lovejoy

  © William H Lovejoy 1990

  William H Lovejoy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1990 by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Dedication

  A book should frequently be dedicated to its readers, for they are very much appreciated. This book is so dedicated.

  Among them are superfans Martha and Carl T; Pamela B; Carol and Brian D; Chuck; Doris, Brian, Brad, and Randy H; and Joyce K.

  And the relentless Marcia.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  First Strike

  At 350,000 feet, the sky was almost black and the stars were brilliant, but Colonel Dallas Grant didn’t have time to notice.

  Grant eased his sub-orbital XSO-5 into a wide circle, cruising at a speed of Mach 5.25. He could see Dmitri on his left wing, but knew he was only minutes behind. Rotating the safety collar on the toggle switch, he armed his number one Hellwinder missile and clicked in on his commo frequency TAC-3.

  “Dmitri, I’m going to active radar in zero-three.”

  “Ready,” the Soviet pilot acknowledged.

  Counting seconds, Grant went active. Suddenly, the green screen was crawling with targets, the sweep painting the two enemy sub-orbitals at 270,000 feet. His heading locked, he shut down his radar and rolled hard to the right to 160 degrees.

  A low-level chirp started to sound in his ear as the letters on his screen blinked, then went solid: LOCK ON.

  Suddenly his threat receiver screamed an emergency signal. The enemy had launched a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at his engines. Grant fingered the commit button and the computer decided it was time to launch. He saw the white hot trail of the Hellwinder leap ahead of him.

  He cut his engines and floated in a black, silent oblivion as the seconds passed slowly.

  Then the fireball exploded ...

  One

  “Three ... two ... one ... ”

  Static on the air.

  “We have ignition. We have lift-off! The bird’s away!”

  There was a quiet exuberance in the mission controller’s voice. It was like a sub-carrier wave in Grant’s headphones. The man was proud of his accomplishment.

  From his vantage point at 120,000 feet and thirty miles south of Vandenberg Air Base, Dallas Grant had an unobstructed view of the launch. He was a private audience. With a synchronized movement of his ailerons, which did not have much effect at that altitude, and a spurt of thrust from the roll thrusters, he banked to the right, then added a touch of elevator and down thrust to put himself into a long and shallow right turn. This detour was not on his test schedule, but he thought he would tag along with the Titan IV for as long as he could. Grant had never felt entirely bound by other people’s schedules, anyway.

  There was a haze spread over the entire West Coast, so he did not see the rocket until it achieved a few thousand feet of altitude. In fact, he could barely make out the milky-white cylinder of the Titan itself. What he saw was a quarter-mile-long trail of white-hot gases which quickly turned to white vapor and then dissipated in the Pacific winds. The rocket accelerated rapidly, climbing toward the ether and moving westward, away from him.

  He advanced the throttles until the panel readout gave him Mach 4.2.

  “Six miles down-range ... velocity five-point-six ... altitude four-four thousand ... ” reported one of the technicians manning a telemetry console.

  On the numeric keypad recessed into his left armrest, just behind the throttle cluster, Grant punched in a computer order. The radar display on the CRT centered in his instrument panel dissolved to be replaced by a true visual display, relayed by the video camera lens in the lower nose of the craft. He cut in his video recorder, then tapped in the code for a magnification of three, and the stratocumulus clouds way below on the Pacific horizon jumped at him. After a quick search, he found the Titan in the bottom right corner of the screen.

  Grant nudged the self-centering control stick and leveled out, keeping his eyes on the rocket as it climbed to the center of his screen.

  “We’ve got fifteen miles down-range ... velocity seven-point-two ... altitude seven-six thousand feet.”

  He would never catch it, of course, but the view was magnificent. Pulling up his nose a trifle, he anticipated the rocket’s climb.

  “Twenty-two miles down-range.”

  Grant kicked the magnification to six, and the Titan grew to four inches long on his screen. The image was fuzzy, but he could almost make out the USAF insignia. Of course, he knew what he was looking for.

  “Thirty-seven miles down-range ... altitude nine-one thousand.”

  He was falling way behind, though his altimeter now read over 150,000 feet while his speed had climbed to Mach 4.5. The image on his screen rose quickly to his level, but diminished as it headed west.

  And then disappeared.

  In a bright orange fireball.

  “Malfunction ... malfunction!”

  “No readings!” screamed a telemetry officer.

  “Vandenberg Control, this is Piper Two.” From earlier transmissions on which he had eavesdropped, Grant knew that the Piper Two codename was that of a naval frigate acting as down-range observer.

  “Vandenberg. Go ahead Piper Two.”

  “We’ve got a fireball, Vandenberg. Looks like complete destruction.”

  “Confirmed, Piper Two. We have complete destruction.” The restrained excitement had gone out of the controller’s voice, replaced by a resignation that sounded habitual.

  All Grant saw on the screen now was a miniscule pale gray vaporous cloud.

  Grant stayed out of the radio conversations. Identifying himself meant trying to explain who he was, and where he was, and why he was not showing up on Vandenberg’s radar screens. It could get very complex very quickly.

  He had video tape of the event, but it would be up to General Billings whether or not it was to be sent over to the analysts in the ICBM program.

  The zest had gone out of his day, and having already completed his scheduled test sequence, Grant decided on an early return. He rolled the sub-orbital into another slow right turn and retarded the throttles. The descending circular flight path would bring him back over the coast north of San Francisco and get him closer to the ground in northern Nevada.

  Automatically, his eyes scanned the red digital readouts for fuel levels, exhaust pressures and temperatures on the rocket engines, and the status of the turbojet. Though it was the newest vehicle in the world’s skies, the sub-orbital was already becoming second nature to him.

  The prototype had been nicknamed Lake Havasu City in flowing orange letters across its matte black nose because it looked so much like a twin-sponsoned hydroplane racing boat, and Lake Havasu on the Colorado River in Arizona hosted many of the major hydroplane races.

  The prototype had disintegrated in less than thirty seconds at 48,000 feet of altitude, its carbon fiber-impregnated skin peeling away at Mach 3.5 and spilling Major Harold Peters into the almost non-existent atmosphere at three times the speed of sound. Major Peters d
isintegrated, also.

  The XSO-4 was the fourth design in the series, and Dallas Grant was relatively pleased with its performance. He had only taken it to 200,000 feet this morning, to run a test sequence on the directional thrusters, and he would rate the execution almost flawless in his post-flight briefing. Grant thought that yaw control was a trifle sensitive, but he wanted a snappier response in roll. That was because he was an ex-fighter pilot with Vietnam experience, and he was just as happy upside-down as right-side up. Crossing the coast, he cut in the modified Identify Friend or Foe transmitter, which generated his blip on radar screens and identified it with the code used by the program and which had become familiar by now to local air controllers.

  He noted his recommendations for the de-briefing on the notepad velcroed to his right thigh. On the stack of pushbuttons to the right of the panel, he found the one marked “GEN PORT,” and punched it. A green light told him that the panel flush with the skin on the lower fuselage had retracted and the port was now scooping air to spin the turbine blades of the auxiliary generator. The activation was confirmed by the readout of the digital ammeter.

  He retarded the twin rocket throttles until they reached their back stops.

  At 35,000 feet and Mach 2.4, he picked out Lake Mead some eighty miles off his left wing, to the east. Las Vegas was a smudge that flashed sun glints at him. Checking his electrical power levels and finding the battery pack in good shape, Grant initiated his turbojet ignition checklist, opening the intake door, working through the toggles, then lifting the red flap and depressing the start button. The RPM indicator told him the turbine was turning, and at 16% RPM’s, he switched the ignition on. He did not hear the whine of the turbine, but the readout indicated that he had a slowly growing thrust on the engine, and after a minute, he advanced the throttle to 100%. When the numbers showed him 25,000 pounds of thrust, he went through the next checklist and shut down the rocket engines. With that loss of power, the sub-orbital immediately began to slow. Lightly loaded with fuel, the craft could barely maintain Mach 1.3 on the single turbojet. At full load on takeoff, the supersonic numbers were out of reach for the jet engine.

  Thumbing the transmit button on the stick for his Tac-1 channel, Grant activated his throat mike. “Nellis Air Control, SOL-zero-four.”

  “Nellis. Go ahead, zero-four.”

  “Zero-four. I’m leaving your area.”

  “Bye-bye zero-four. Keep the sunny side up. Nellis Air Control over and out.”

  “Zero-four over and out.”

  The air controller did not know it, nor did anyone at Nellis Air Force Base, but XSO-4 did not have a shiny side. Much of the Blackbird and Stealth technology had found its way into the Sub-orbiters. The matte black nose and leading edges faded into flat dark gray along the fuselage and curved surfaces of the delta wing. The paint used was pioneered on the Lockheed U-2 spy plane and contained “iron balls” which gave the surface the dark gray appearance at optical wavelengths. The electrically conducting paint, however, leveled surface voltages and gave the craft a smaller RCS, radar cross-section, at D through J radar band wavelengths. It was especially not shiny on radar, a fact that air controllers in test areas had complained about. On all test flights over populated areas, or in heavy air traffic, the pilots were supposed to keep their special IFF transmitters operating.

  The SOL radio codename for the experimental sub-orbiter (XSO) program had evolved on its own after Lake Havasu City was destroyed. Major Dennis Blake, one of the three pilots — including himself — in Dallas Grant’s test squadron, had come up with it: “Shit-outta-luck.”

  Grant banked slightly to the right and turned to a compass heading of 190 degrees. The Avawatz Mountains spread across his windscreen, Fort Irwin hidden on the other side of them.

  The three throttle handles, two of them vertical and the closest one bent out at a 45-degree angle were located alongside his left hand. He was still slowing rapidly, but he went ahead and retarded his turbojet throttle another notch.

  On the left center of the instrument panel, the digital read-out of the velocity indicator gauge decreased steadily. 1.05 ... 1.03 ... 1.00.

  At Mach.97, he felt a tiny shudder in the control stick.

  The aircraft shivered.

  The vibration immediately ceased, but Grant made a notation on his thigh pad.

  At Mach.95, the velocity indicator automatically converted itself and provided readings in miles per hour. He had slowed the craft to 700 miles per hour and lowered his altitude to 12,000 feet by the time Barstow showed up on his left. Heat waves shimmered over the city. Beyond, the San Gabriel Mountains disguised Los Angeles, but the pale brown atmosphere domed over the city gave away its location. Farther to the north, the mid-morning sun had burned off most of the morning’s ground fog.

  Grant punched in a new frequency on his Nav-Com radios, gave his SOL call-sign, and checked in with Edwards Air Control. The controller cleared him for the area, and he tapped the keyboard again to switch the radios to the independent control tower for the XSO program.

  Lieutenant General Lane Billings, who headed the American side of the development program, was famous for a variety of endeavors, not the least of which was getting his own way. He had secured a private corner of Edwards for the program. When he was running a partially secret project, Billings liked to be a long way from politicians, media superstars, and interfering military brass. He had succeeded here. The compound was called Rosie, in reference to the city of Rosamond, ten miles to the southwest. There was one twelve-thousand-foot runway with a shack someone had had the guts to call a control tower. Set well back from the runway were six hangars, a mess hall, a building converted to offices, and eight barracks buildings. The Air Force liked to call them residence halls, but Grant called them what they were. All of the structures were of 1950s vintage.

  Grant crossed the Edwards outer boundaries almost on the deck. While they were not a top secret project, they did try to keep a low profile. Many of the test flights were conducted at night. Daytime flights stayed clear of population centers and tried to avoid being spotted as much as possible. The program had been in existence for three years and flight-operational for fifteen months. In the last year, UFO sightings by concerned citizens had increased tenfold.

  The controller at Rosie gave him a straight-in clearance, and Grant turned onto a heading of 270 degrees and bled off power. The sub-orbital aircraft did not have flaps and could not increase its lift at low speeds. The landing speed was 245 miles per hour. It had taken Grant a while to become accustomed to it.

  On either side of him, the tan landscape melted into infinity. Ahead, the blue-gray asphalt came up fast. He dropped his landing gear and got three reassuring green LED’s on the panel.

  The outer marker flashed below.

  Grant brought the throttle back to detent and leveled the stub wings with a twitch of the stick.

  The nose tried to lift on him.

  He touched the throttle and brought it back down in line.

  Airspeed 290.

  Then 265.

  Then 250.

  The main gear touched down with a shriek of rubber he could hear through the insulated cockpit walls. Seconds later, the nose gear squeaked as the tire found the yellow center line. At a speed of 190 miles per hour, Grant brought the throttle back past the detent and began to introduce reverse thrust.

  The buildings of Rosie shot past him on the right, gray blurry blots. They moved pretty good for forty-year-olds, he thought to himself.

  He was just about out of runway before the indicator showed him thirty miles an hour. Grant braked a bit harder and used the nosewheel steering stud on the stick to veer off the runway onto a taxiway. Seven minutes later, he brought it to a stop in front of Hangar One and depressurized the cockpits. The forward and the aft cockpit were separate environments. He touched the button that elevated the front canopy.

  As the soft rubber seals popped, the hot desert air of May rushed inside and ruined his envir
onment.

  Tech Sergeant Henry Gloom waved at him as he tractored toward the sub-orbiter. Gloom drove the tractor as if it were a dune buggy. He whipped a 180-degree turn in front of the nose, then backed up at ten miles per hour, lowering the boom that attached to the nose wheel.

  As Grant disconnected communications cables and oxygen fittings, unsnapped his oxygen mask and lifted his helmet off, and unbuckled his harness, Gloom towed the craft toward the refueling station. After a flight, the aircraft were fueled with JP-4 for the turbojet, and the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels for the rocket engines were suctioned out of the tanks. They were not pumped aboard until just before takeoff, and then only after the fuel cells were purged with gaseous helium to remove air impurities and dry the tanks. After the combination fueling and de-fueling, the craft were parked in a hangar, ready for the technicians and engineers to make any corrections noted as necessary in the test flight report.

  Grant stood up in the cockpit and hooked his helmet over the windscreen. The front cockpit was almost six feet wide, but it was so crammed with electronics and control consoles that it made a six-foot, wide-shouldered man feel cramped. Under his pressure suit and flight suit, his skin felt clammy, the moisture of perspiration trapped.

  Gloom towed the sub-orbiter to a parking place in front of the fueling station, and two airmen dressed in protective asbestos suits and hoods scampered out of an air-conditioned hut and went to work connecting hoses to the receptacles on the aircraft. Grant read the remaining fuel poundage from the digital readouts, called the numbers down to them, then shut off power to the instrument panel.

  The tech sergeant got off his tractor, removed a ladder hung on the side of the hood, and brought it back to fasten into the fuselage.

  Grant levered his left leg out of the cockpit first, sat on the coaming, and then worked his right leg outside. Getting out of the damned thing required talent usually reserved for circuses. Below the canopy, the fuselage swooped outward, into a lateral fin that gave the machine a pancake-ish front end. The lateral fins spread out as they went back, eventually molding into the stubby delta wing.