Sedona Conspiracy

CHAPTER NINETEEN ^{THE PORTAL}

When Eric got to Sparrow’s bay a cluster of men awaited him. Nutt was there with his clipboard. Flight Operations Chief Rob Hendricks was accompanied by two techs Eric hadn’t met, and there was a new man with a buzz cut. He wore fatigues, sleeves rolled up, captain’s bars on his collar. Hendricks introduced him to Eric.

“Eric, this is Captain Ted Dillon, our chief test pilot. He’s the one person who’s been able to get this bird off the ground. I’ve told him all about you.”

“Not everything, I hope. Captain, I have a few hundred questions for you.” Eric managed a friendly smile, and shook hands with the man.

“Sir. Colonel Davis said you might want to risk your neck in this thing.” Dillon patted Sparrow’s fuselage as he said it.

“Yes, I’d like a ride. I’m not a pilot, Captain. I just want to see what you can do with her.”

“Not much so far. Sparrow is VTOL and handles like a helicopter with too much load aft. The tricky part is getting her out of this bay.” Dillon pointed up at the ceiling. “After that it’s like flying a Harrier, nice and smooth, but I haven’t been able to push her past Mach 1. I have an opinion about this aircraft, sir, if you’d like to hear it.”

“I would,” said Eric.

“I think it’s a piece of junk, sir. Looks like stealth, but has a normal radar signature. It doesn’t seem to be equipped for fly-by-wire, but should be, especially for takeoff and landing. Flies like a bumblebee at low velocity. Weird design. Even the controls look like they’ve been cobbled together by a five-year-old, and most of them don’t do anything.”

“Eric found a use for some of those switches,” said Hendricks.

“Yeah, I heard,” said Dillon. “You were lucky, sir. In my business, randomly throwing a bunch of switches like that in a strange aircraft can get you killed before you leave the ground.”

“I agree with that, Captain. That’s why I want you there in the seat next to me when I try out a few ideas in flight. Do you know what we found inside Sparrow?”

“I told him what we have so far,” said Hendricks.

“He says you think this bird has two power plants,” said Dillon.

“One conventional, and one for space.”

“Space? No way, sir, not with that engine. Sluggish as hell, especially near Mach 1. I had to keep pushing the nose down.”

“Like there was too much mass aft?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“I’d like to see it first-hand, and run some tests. When can we do it?”

“Colonel Davis says it’s your call, but he wants a detailed briefing on any tests you want to make in flight. I’d like that too, sir.”

“I’ll have it tomorrow. Will you take me up?”

“It’s part of my job, sir. Another part is being cautious enough to bring us back alive. I’m in charge up there.”

“Understood, Captain, as long as you’re willing to take some risks.”

Dillon chuckled. “Just being in that thing is a risk, sir.”

Eric slapped the man’s shoulder, then, “let’s take a look at that cockpit, and I’ll show you what I found.”

The two of them climbed up onto the stubby wing of Sparrow and squeezed together into the cockpit. Dillon was a small man compared to Eric, but their shoulders were pressed tightly against each other. Dillon smiled at him. “They put guys like you in bombers.”

“Not if I can help it. I prefer my feet on the ground. Brief me on the controls you use. I want to make a diagram.”

Dillon showed him what he’d used in powered flight: startup sequence, VTOL, landing gear, transition, pitch, yaw and trim, all of it without computer. All controls occupied the left half of the cockpit. Eric went through the overhead switch sequence, opened up Sparrow behind them, and closed it again. He wrote everything down, showed it to Dillon.

“Not much,” said Eric. “Two-thirds of these controls are for other things, and the manual tells us nothing about them. This one, for example.”

Eric flipped a switch by his left knee. There was a thud, and five rows of red lights flared right in front of him.

“Jesus,” said Dillon.

“Oops,” said Eric. “Well, we’re still here.”

“Don’t do that again, sir. Better turn the switch off again.”

“Wait a minute. Only this one panel lit up.” Eric drew a quick picture in his notes. “Everything here must work together. There are glyphs by each switch.” Eric wrote each of them down, unfamiliar markings like ancient runes. As he did it, his mind seemed to wander for an instant, his hand moving as if by habit, without the slightest hesitation or sense of caution. He threw the first switch in each of four rows, and all lights on the panel went from red to green. Sparrow shuddered for one instant, and there was a high-pitched whine, either low in intensity or at the edge of the range of human hearing.

“Hey, what are you guys doing in there? The whole aircraft just shook!” called Hendricks from outside.

“Found something new,” said Eric. “Keep your eyes open.”

“Are you nuts?” growled Dillon.”

“Not with a green board in front of me.”

One switch on the panel remained unlit, and Eric threw it. There was a metallic creak from behind them, and a single light glowed green on another panel by Eric’s right knee. He wrote something else down while Dillon watched him, ashen-faced.

“Something’s happening out here,” cried Hendricks. “You’d better take a look at it.”

“Just tell us,” said Dillon. “We’re busy in here.”

“The plane is heating up! There’s heat radiating from the aft section of the fuselage, and the metal is getting hotter by the second!”

Dillon looked angrily at Eric. “Well, what now?”

Again no hesitation, some kind of strange instinct guiding him when Eric said, “This is as far as we can go on the ground. We’ll have to do the rest in flight.” He reached out and began throwing the same switches again, in reverse order. The lights went from green to red, then off.

“And you really expect me to fly with you when you do crazy shit like this? Sir!”

“You’re the test pilot, Captain. Are you telling me you don’t want to see what’ll happen when we go through the rest of this?”

“Okay, it’s cooling down out here!” yelled Hendricks.

Dillon let out a breath of air through pursed lips. “Not if it kills me. But this isn’t luck, is it. I watched you close, and you’ve been told what to do, I’m sure of it. You didn’t even flinch.”

“Maybe,” said Eric, and remembered what Brown had said to him. It had all seemed natural, rehearsed, a task repeated a thousand times, and he knew why. It was a startup sequence to power Sparrow into space, the initiation of a power plant only hinted at in the bowels of the craft. He’d been right to shut down when he did; to go further would have unleashed a terrible power in the closed bay. The sequence to follow was in his head, a panel of switches by his right knee, a handle at the top, a quarter turn, and then—what? It ended there, for the moment, but he knew it would have to be done in flight, and high in the atmosphere.

“I have to trust you. You’re the only person who has flown this thing. The question is whether or not you can trust me. If you follow my directions we can take Sparrow into space, and there won’t be any Mission Control to help us. You’ll be the pilot of this thing, not me. I’ll be relying completely on your flying experience to get us down alive.”

Dillon’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve flown in space, and back again. It wouldn’t be a first for me.”

The man was a military pilot, not an astronaut. “Aurora?” asked Eric.

Dillon blinked slowly. “So when do we take this bird up all the way?”

“Just as soon as I can get Colonel Davis to clear the test. There’s nothing about this in the flight manual. I’ll have to convince him I know what to do. I can’t write it down for a permanent record. Look at these notes, and memorize the sequence. I’m destroying the notes after we climb out of here, and I don’t worry about forgetting what’s in them. Don’t ask why.”

Dillon took the notes from him, studied them a minute, handed them back. “Okay, Got it. Now what?”

“We get out of the plane, act like we had a nice chat, and make up a story about how we got that panel to go green. I’ll do the talking. I’m probably a much better liar than you. It’s part of my training.”

“I’ll bet it is,” said Dillon.

“Let’s start with a diversion,” said Eric. He flipped some switches; Sparrow shuddered, the aft fuselage opening again. “Get a probe in there, and look for residual radiation!” he called out.

Eric followed Dillon out of the cockpit and off the wing to the ground. Two techs were already leaning inside the open maw of Sparrow’s belly to place instruments there.

“So, what was all that heat about?” asked Hendricks.

“Just throwing switches again, and suddenly an entire panel went green. That’s when you started yelling about heat.”

Hendricks looked at Dillon, but the man just shrugged as if it was all a mystery to him. In the meantime, Eric wadded up two small pieces of paper in his hand and shoved them in his pocket. Sergeant Nutt was watching, saw him do it, and raised an eyebrow.

“I need to see Colonel Davis right away,” Eric said to Nutt.

“Sir,” said Nutt, and pulled out his field phone.

Hendricks tapped Eric on the shoulder to get his attention again. “I’m not buying the good luck act, Doctor. Where are you getting your information?”

Eric thought fast, and decided a partial confession would be better than a lie. “I’m not at liberty to say. Sorry, that’s the best I can do. I will tell you that tests from now on will have to be done in flight. Captain Dillon and I were just talking about it. We’re taking Sparrow up as soon as we get approval from Davis.”

“So why you? Why have the rest of us been kept in the dark?”

Eric shook his head. “Wish I knew. Politics, personalities, who knows? The decision came down from the people who brought Sparrow to us. I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

It worked. Eric could see it in Hendricks’ eyes. For the moment, the explanation had logic to it, though questions were sure to come later.

“Then maybe they should make an effort to know us better,” said Hendricks. “There aren’t any politicians here.”

“Doctor Price!” called Nutt. “Colonel Davis wants to see you right away.”

Eric nodded, as a tech came back from inspecting Sparrow. “No radiation, outside of IR, but the metal’s still warm in there, around one-ten.”

Eric answered the tech before Hendricks could open his mouth to reply. “In space, there won’t be any T increase. Decay time is nanoseconds once the field is powered down in vacuum. At full power and one atmosphere we could melt the airframe in a hurry. That’s why we can’t go further with testing unless we get Sparrow above the atmosphere.”

The tech stared at him, and Hendricks scowled. Nutt came up, put a hand on his arm. “Got to go, sir.”

“And when you come back, maybe you can let us in on more of your secrets,” said Hendricks.

“I will. I know this isn’t fair to you guys, but I didn’t ask for it. It’s just the way it is.”

Hendricks glared at him, and turned away. The two techs looked nervously in other directions. Nutt took Eric by one elbow and hurried him away.

“Shit!” said Eric. “I can’t blame them for being pissed.”

“Nothing new,” said Nutt. “It was the same with Johnson. He was getting information the rest weren’t. It’s the only reason we got Sparrow off the ground.”

“Davis never said anything about that.”

“You didn’t hear it from me, sir. Oh, I didn’t have a chance to tell the Colonel what you just did with Sparrow. He wanted to know if I was with you, and said he had to see you right away.”

“So I’ll surprise him,” said Eric. “This base seems to be full of surprises.”

They left Sparrow’s bay, took the elevator up and Nutt knocked on Davis’ door. There was no answer for a moment, so Nutt knocked again. “Come!” came a reply, and Nutt opened the door. “Doctor Price is here, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Eric entered the office, immediately smelled a vaguely familiar, musky odor, as if incense were burning nearby, but saw nothing like that. Davis was sitting behind his desk, chin resting on cupped hands. “Have a seat, Doctor. I think you’re going to like this.”

Eric sat. “What is it?” The sweet odor was even stronger where he was sitting. He noticed the door to the adjoining office was ajar. Was the smell coming from there?

“You wanted more access to the base, and you just got it. Our foreign friends seem to think you’re the man to nail our saboteurs, and need to know counts for everything around here. I suppose you’ve wondered how we got Sparrow into that bay in the first place.”

“Yes, but I know the ceiling opens up. A cargo helicopter could drop a load through there.”

“True,” said Davis, “but that’s not the way it happens. We have a special port in a neighboring bay. Everything comes through there, and I’ve been instructed to show it to you. Mister Brown was very insistent. You must have made quite an impression on him.”

“If I did, it wasn’t obvious to me, but I just had another breakthrough with Sparrow, and I need your approval for some flight tests.”

It was as if Davis hadn’t heard him. “Do you want to see the delivery port, or don’t you? It’s Brown’s idea, not mine. If it were up to me, I’d keep you out of there. Too many people already know about it.”

“Of course I want to see it. Right away. But if you let me make some flight tests, I think we can have Sparrow in space this week. Captain Dillon was with me today, and we found out how to activate most of the controls. The rest we’ll have to do in flight.”

“I thought the manual was still missing what you needed.”

“It was—is, I mean. But we figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

Eric told him, making it sound like he and Dillon had done it together in a systematic way until they had a green board and heat was boiling from the fuselage.

“Jesus,” said Davis.

“We had to shut down. Whatever field is in that thing, we’ll have to be in near vacuum to bring it up to full power. I need your authorization to make the necessary flight test. Dillon is with me on this.”

“You want to fly it with Dillon.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not a pilot.”

“Dillon can fly. I’ll conduct the power up procedure.”

“More magic insights, is that it, Price?”

“Brown didn’t seem to think so. Maybe I actually know what I’m doing.”

It was like a slap in his face. Davis flinched, and glared back at Eric. “Well, you did impress the right person. He made that clear to me, and my orders are to keep him happy.”

Orders from where? thought Eric, “I can have a briefing ready for you by the end of the day. All I want to do is a run up to full power, and then pull back. No maneuvers, no performance evaluation, nothing like that.”

“Keep it short. I’ll consider it. Are you done, now? Can we do what I just brought you here for? I thought it was what you wanted so badly.”

“The port, you mean. Yes! Right now, if you have the time.”

“I’m making the time. Only a handful of us are allowed in that bay. The rest are foreign personnel.”

“Foreigners in a top-secret U.S. military base? That has to be a first.”

“It isn’t,” said Davis. “There are a lot of perks for bringing over valuable technology, and a lot of trust. We get the technology. We don’t ask how they bring it over, and they don’t tell us. You’ll have to see this thing to understand what I mean.”

“When?”

Davis stood up. “Follow me.”

They left the office. Davis ordered Sergeant Nutt to return to Sparrow’s bay. At the elevator, he turned to Eric and softly said, “Where we’re going is near Sparrow’s location, but we’re taking another route. I’ll show you the connecting passage on the way back.”

They took the elevator down to the reception platform at tunnel level. Two guards stood by a jeep. Davis led Eric to the jeep, saluted, and got in the driver’s seat. The vehicle jerked as Eric sat down, backed up, turned into the tunnel and sped for a hundred yards to a turnout on the left. They parked there, opened a metal door in red rock. Hot air rushed out at them.

They were in a machine shop, a hallway separated from the shop area by a wall of transparent polymer. Several men were in the shop, watching work turning on mills and lathes. Beyond them was a wall flickering with the reflected light of an arc welder.

At the end of the hallway were three doors, all with cardkey locks, otherwise unmarked. Davis chose the center door, ran his card through the slot of the lock, and opened it. A short hallway led them to a guard in a plas-steel-enclosed booth. Another guard, armed with an M-16, stepped into the booth behind him. Both men regarded Davis and Eric somberly until Davis had swiped his cardkey and punched in a sequence of seven numbers. There was a loud click, and a door adjacent to the booth opened up.

They stepped into a room the size of a large closet. Another door was across from them, a red light blinking on a panel there. Davis closed the door behind them, turned to Eric. “Just for the record, if I’d changed one of the numbers I punched in back there, you would now be dead or dying.”

Eric smiled back at him. “Nice of you not to do that,” he said.

They waited a few seconds, and the light on the panel opposite them turned green. Davis opened the door, stepped aside for Eric to enter ahead of him.

Heads turned when he entered. Four men sat at a console looking out through glass at banks of lights hanging from a high, rock ceiling. The men were all young, with hard, chiseled features. Two turned away after only a glance, but one studied Eric for a moment with startling, blue eyes.

Eric and Davis stood behind the men and looked out on a bay half the size of the one housing Sparrow, but full of activity as they watched. Overhead cranes moved freight boxes the size of Humvees to flatcars on tracks. Men walked back and forth with smaller cargo pushed on hydraulic lifters, a large stack of boxes and crates awaiting their attention along the rock wall of the bay.

“Another shipment just came in. It’ll be a while. Want some coffee?”

“Sure,” said Eric.

“How about you guys?” asked Davis, and tapped the shoulder of one of the men sitting at the console.

“No thank you, sir,” said the man. “We must prepare here.”

Not Russian, but Slavic, thought Eric.

Davis brought Eric a foam cup of black coffee, and pointed out towards the bay. “We’re the only two Americans in here, now. We’re not allowed down on the bay floor, but you can see everything from here. Most of the people you see will be leaving soon. The portal itself is that entire wall on the other side of the floor.”

Eric looked, but saw only a rough rock wall, floor to ceiling. “Pretty well disguised,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one man at the console studying him, but the man looked away when Eric turned around.

“There’s a large tunnel beyond the wall, but I have no idea where it leads to,” said Davis. “I don’t like admitting that, but it was all part of the deal to bring Sparrow in.”

“This whole project must go far up the command chain,” said Eric.

“At least Chief of Staff,” said Davis. “And all my orders come down through the Pentagon.”

“Think it might go as far as the White House?”

Davis shrugged. “Could be.”

A line of men was now forming on the floor below them. A second line formed quickly, with men steering hydraulic lifters. The lights in the ceiling suddenly dimmed, and several red lights went on along the walls close to the floor. The cab of an overhead crane moved back to a wall, a door opened, and a man descended a ladder there to join the others.

“Should be any minute, now. They all leave together.”

The lights in the ceiling dimmed further. The men at the console were murmuring into their headsets, their hands moving over panels in front of them. If there were sounds in the bay, Eric couldn’t hear them through the thick window of the room. The floor was now in gloom, and though Eric’s eyes adjusted quickly it was now difficult to pick out individuals in the lines of men.

The far wall suddenly glowed deep red, then orange, faint but distinct. Davis pointed, said, “The glow is a kind of protective barrier. I’ve been told it would be dangerous to touch the wall right now.”

The effect only lasted seconds, the orange glow overwhelmed by a blue glare rising from floor to ceiling in rippling waves and lighting up the entire floor for one instant before disappearing in a blink, and where the wall had been was now inky blackness. The two lines of men marched straight into the blackness, the lifters rolling along with them. When they were gone, the blue glare descended again, a blinding thing. Eric blinked once, twice, and saw only rock on the far side of the floor. The ceiling lights remained dim, but he could see the floor was now empty.

“Quite a show,” said Eric.

“Sometimes I wonder if that’s all it is. Brown says it’s an electromagnetic door they’d like to develop here for their own profit if we can complete the Sparrow project with them,” said Davis.

“Capitalism is contagious,” said Eric, but looked down at a folded piece of paper that had suddenly appeared on the floor by his feet. The men at the console had finished their jobs, pushed back their chairs to stand up. The man nearest Eric, the one who’d been glancing at him from time to time, leaned over, picked up the paper and handed it to him. “You have dropped this,” he said. In the low light, his blue eyes seemed violet in color.

Eric acted by instinct. “Uh—thank you,” he said, and pocketed the paper.

They all left the console room, Brown’s people and Eric behind Davis, turning in opposite directions in a hallway. “Where do they go?” asked Eric.

“They have quarters near here. We don’t go there, either. They even have their own cooks,” said Davis.

They went through two cardkey-controlled doors and descended in an elevator to a small bay filled with crates. An unlocked door led them into a corner of Sparrow’s bay, a few techs still crawling over the craft in the center of the floor. Dillon was still there with Hendricks, studying something in the flight manual.

“Get that briefing to me. Keep it short,” said Davis, and walked back towards where they’d entered the bay.

Eric told the others he’d been on a tour, and had to write a brief on the flight tests he wanted to make. Dillon and Hendricks gave up the table to him, and went away with the manual. The techs continued work inside Sparrow, disconnecting instruments used to measure heat flux earlier in the hour. Eric used a legal pad on the table, scribbled a few words, and pulled the folded paper from his pocket. He unfolded it, and a small photograph of a man was there. On the paper were words written in neat, block lettering.

‘The man in the picture is considered dangerous to our project. If he’s ever seen in the portal area he should be immediately detained and arrested.’

It was signed ‘Mister Brown’.

Eric looked again.

The man in the photograph was John Coulter.

Why am I not surprised? thought Eric.