Chapter 4

Oki Jima

The stars always seemed extra bright above the secret air base known as XH-2.

On clear nights, with no moon, it was like you could reach up and touch them, the sky out here was so crystal clear.

The base was located on the southern tip of the small jungle island of Oki Jima, which itself was just three miles off the coast of the island of Guam. XH-2 was old. Originally built by the Japanese Army as a radio listening post in the mid-1930s, it served as an intelligence base during World War II and was one of the first places to fall after the battle for Guam. The U.S. Air Force built two runways here during the Vietnam War from which to launch U-2 spy planes. The base had remained open, at various levels of readiness, ever since.

There were three hangars here. They looked like very, very expensive warehouses. They were painted with a coating of charcoal black paint that turned two shades of green during the day. This chameleon act was in place to baffle any photo-satellites going over the highly classified place, unfriendly or not.

It was almost 10:00 P.M., the hangars were charcoal now, and the stars above were dazzling, making the buildings look bejeweled. There was a distinct, if muffled, sound coming from each building. These were very elaborate air-conditioning units working overtime. It was a pleasant tropical Pacific night, low seventies and low humidity. But what lay within each structure worked best at temperatures of 55 degrees or below. For them, being chilled meant being invisible.

They were B-2Fs, a top-secret variation of the famous B-2 bat-winged Stealth bomber. They were bigger, stealthier, and more expensive than their $1 billion cousins. The stock-version B-2 had a large bomb bay where a mix of bombs weighing many tons could be carried, dispensed by a rotary launcher. The B-2Fs were equipped with these bomb launchers, too, but they were portable and could be quickly changed out, opening up a large area of the spy bomber to carry…well, just about anything. Photo recon packages. Jumbo jamming pods. Radiation detectors. Even black-ops eavesdropping gear. These exotic cargoes were called NLPs—for non-lethal payloads. Things that either the military or the intelligence services needed to be put over a target low and fast, without anyone knowing about it.

These three B-2Fs had been in existence since the late 1990s. They’d flown missions all over the world but had been home-based here on Oki Jima since the latest war in Iraq. Their mission was to help U.S. assets in and out of the Pacific Rim get whatever they needed whenever they needed it. And the B-2Fs could fly to the northern tip of North Korea and all the way to the last hill in Syria in order to get it.

Major John Atels, code-named Atlas, had been flying B-2Fs for two years. He was early forties, divorced, no kids. He was known as one of the best B-2 frame pilots around, which was actually a backhanded compliment, as the B-2 was the only plane in the U.S. inventory where the pilot was the crew member and the mission commander was the captain of the plane. Still it took great skill to jockey the big black bomber around, especially into and out of the nutty places Higher Authority wanted the B-2Fs to go.

The plane could fly anywhere in the world on auto pilot; its almost roboticlike flight system was called Hal by many of its crews. It was that sophisticated. But once the B-2F had to go in on its target—or, in its non-lethal mode, its “target sweep”—human hands were needed on the controls.

For those few sometimes scary moments, Atlas was indeed one of the best.

 

He’d been told to report to the flight line at 2200 hours, not an unusual time, as the B-2Fs always flew their missions at night. He was to meet his flight partner here. He, too, was an Air Force major, Ted Ballgaite. To just about everyone who knew him, though, he was “Teddy Ballgame.”

The B-2F needed someone other than the pilot to be in charge because there was a huge defensive systems suite onboard the ship; sometimes running it was more labor-intensive than flying the damn airplane. The Stealth bomber was not invisible just because of its shape, low temperature, and paint alone. It was filled with electronic countermeasures, jammers, and other secret gadgets that had to work together if the plane wanted to stay a ghost. All this hardware needed to have a good eye and a quick hand to keep running smoothly. Teddy was a good guy, in the air and to have a few drinks with. He also had a mind like a Cray supercomputer.

Teddy was speaking with two men when Atlas arrived on the flight line. He did not recognize either one. Guam was out in the middle of nowhere; Oki Jima was even farther off the map. It was a very small base and everyone knew one another. So these two had to be visitors. And because this was such a secret place, they had to be top-heavy, security-wise.

They were dressed in what Atlas liked to call “casual spy.” Jeans, denim shirts, expensive sneakers, and sunglasses, even at night. These guys were from one of the United States’ intelligence agencies. Atlas could spot them a mile away.

He’d been dealing with Intelligence types for years. These days many were from the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, a strange collection of individuals with the nonthreatening name. Reconnaissance to most people meant taking pictures at high altitudes by either fast-flying aircraft or satellites. But that was just a small bit of it. The NRO guys reconned everything and had the stuff to do it with. When a story came out years before that the United States had a satellite that, from 180 miles up, could zoom in so close to an individual on the ground it could read the label of the cigarette pack in his pocket, the NRO guys were pissed. That was their satellite—but they weren’t upset by the security leak. They were mad that their eye in the sky, code-named Dressing Mirror, wasn’t given its props. Reading the name of a person’s cigarette pack had been achieved approximately around the same time as Saturday Night Fever. These days, the NRO could count the number of threads holding on the top button of the smoker’s shirt. And if that button popped off, they would be able to listen in on his cell phone conversation telling his wife that she had some mending to do tonight. Then they could track the wife as she went to the sewing shop to buy thread to do the repair and hear just about every conversation she had along the way. And then they could find out what TV shows the lovebirds watched that night, what radio stations they listened to. What time they went to bed. Even what they did when the lights went out….

Cigarette label? It was an insult….

But these guys talking to Teddy were not NRO, Atlas surmised. The NROs tended to be younger, more wide-eyed, than other U.S. spy types. These two seemed old at 30; both were smoking, supposedly verboten on a flight line. Both were also carrying side arms, sometimes a mark of the CIA.

They were gone by the time Atlas walked up to the plane. He didn’t see them leave; they just weren’t there when he arrived. He and Teddy had their traditional handshake, even though they’d seen each other just a few minutes before. The ground crew was working feverishly on their aircraft’s hollowed-out bomb bay. Although the vast majority of maintenance on the spy bomber had to be done inside its million-dollar hangar, last-minute stuff could be done out in the open. It just couldn’t take very long.

Atlas looked back and saw the ground guys loading not a “weather package” or an exhaust detector system into the open bay but…suitcases. Or what appeared to be suitcases anyway. There had to be at least thirty of them, either already up inside the spy bomber or on the ground waiting to be put on. A closer look revealed that they may have been made of some kind of composite fiber; some were black, some brown. Yet they looked like nothing more unusual than what could be seen twirling around a baggage carousel at a typical airport.

“What the hell are those things?” he asked Teddy straightaway.

A very practiced shrug was Teddy’s reply. “Beats me,” he said. “All I know is that we’re flying them in somewhere.”

Atlas thought he was joking. “Flying them in?” he asked. “As in delivering them?”

Teddy nodded. “Dat’s the plan.”

Atlas just laughed. He and Teddy had flown some freaky missions since joining the Fs, but never had they delivered something to anyone before. But a bigger surprise was yet to come. These cases were obviously going to someone who would not normally have access to whatever was inside them. A typical shipment of anything hush-hush, to a U.S. ally or customer, would be done by a slow, inexpensive cargo plane, not a billion-dollar spy bomber. So Atlas just assumed they were moving the bags from one secret U.S. location to another, for later shipment to a third party somewhere. That would have made some sense at least.

But he was wrong. According to Teddy they’d be delivering them—whatever they were—to their new owners directly.

“Jessuzz…where?” Atlas asked him.

Teddy was no fool. He would never actually speak the name—there was no way of knowing who might be listening in. Instead he simply held up the cloth map just given to him by the Spooks. There were only numbers on this map, no names, no cities marked. But Atlas looked at the coordinates and knew immediately where they were going.

“Really…?”

Teddy just shrugged and rolled his eyes.

Their orders were to fly the suitcases to Hanoi. A luggage delivery to the communist government of Vietnam.

 

It took them a half hour to do their preflight before they were ready to fly.

Despite the highly unusual nature of their mission tonight, from the moving-through-air point of view, it was really just another milk run. Once aloft, they would fly a course due south, avoiding anything coming within 20 miles of them. They had an in-flight refueling scheduled for 0100 hours, somewhere over the northern tip of the Philippines, then a landing at Pha Dong Airfield, a secret base 20 miles northwest of Hanoi. Vietnamese soldiers would be on hand to unload the strange cargo. They knew how to unlock the lashing mechanisms on the bottom of the plane. Atlas and Teddy would not even have to shut down the engines. Departure would be no later than 15 minutes after landing.

Then after another refuel over the ’Peens, they’d be back on Oki for breakfast.

Takeoff was normal. They climbed to 20,000 feet, steering south. The clear skies, the blazing stars, good weather was predicted both down and back. These were perfect conditions for the invisible airplane.

Atlas and Teddy had done so many highly classified flights, very little impressed them now. But this one was very different.

What if these guys come out with their Nikons and start shooting pictures? Atlas wondered as soon as they reached altitude and leveled off. There were a lot of things about the Stealth plane that were still top-secret. Now they were going to fly not just a B-2 bomber but this highly classified version of the bomber into a place where, a generation before, U.S. pilots just like them had fought hard, dropped bombs, and, in many cases, tumbled to their deaths, trying to destroy.

Teddy Ballgame knew just what he was thinking.

“Things change,” he said simply.

 

The flight along the Pacific Rim was sweet.

Had this been a combat mission, say to Afghanistan or above some pesky target in Iraq (or even Iran), Atlas would not have to touch the main controls of the B-2F at all, through the approach, through the target run, through the exit, so computer-driven the bomber was. For the most part, this flight was no different. They were caretakers, watching over the controls certainly, but leaving it up to Hal to actually run things. The designers of the plane knew this; they factored in the crew’s comfort and attention levels when designing the flight compartment—this would be the last manned bomber of this size ever built for the U.S. military, and to some degree Atlas and Teddy were just along for the ride. Teddy brought along a book, a biography of FDR. Atlas brought his Sports Illustrateds, three months’ worth; they’d arrived from his father the day before, an accumulation that would do perfectly for the projected 12-hour flight.

They passed Taiwan, after seeing the lights of Hong Kong off to the west. Even at night, the first islands of the Philippines appeared almost emerald. They were still at 20,000 feet, still invisible. Then their communications suite came alive. It was a beacon being sent out by their refueling plane. They had arrived at precisely the moment they should have. And so had the refueler.

 

It was a KC-10 Extender, a reconfigured DC-10 airliner used by the U.S. Air Force to carry and transfer thousands of gallons of highly volatile JP-8 aviation fuel, the lifeblood of the B-2F and every other warplane in the U.S. arsenal. Literally, it was a flying gas station.

The refueler was out of Diego Garcia, another out-of-the-way place, this one located in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It was not unusual for tankers to fly many hours in one direction to meet a plane needing to refuel coming in the other direction. Atlas and Teddy were talking on the radio with the KC-10 within minutes of getting a clear visual. Aerial refuelings were usually done entirely over water. This one would take place mostly over water, specifically the Bangtang Channel, a narrow strip of ocean just off the mainland of Luzon. But once they reached the channel, they would pick up the small islands of Calayan, Fuggu and Dalu Pree below. Combined they did not equal the square footage of downtown Dallas. They served well as navigation guides, though, friendly reminders that Atlas and Teddy were on-course.

The Bangtang Channel was the most advantageous place for both planes to meet. In fact, it was a favorite refueling spot for the United States’ aerial black ops. Isolated yet easy to find, dark except for the stars, with very few eyes on the ground looking up. Thousands of gallons of aviation fuel would be transferred up here tonight, between two planes worth about a billion and ten, all without the knowledge—or permission—of the Filipino government.

The B-2 was hands-off, but the computer couldn’t fly the refueling session. Atlas would have to make sure the plane was riding right, and when it came time to fuck the duck it would be his eyes, his hands, his brain. Teddy, by procedure, would be constantly monitoring the plane’s survival systems during fuel transfer. The computer quickly pulled the plane up to the long fuel boom extended out of the rear of the KC-10 and then switched the flight over to Atlas. He eased the big bat up toward the boom. The KC guys were good; they were holding their Johnson pipe steady. Atlas caught a little wind at the last moment but then pushed the throttle forward just a bit and the two planes connected without so much as a bump. In seconds, hundreds of gallons of fuel was rushing into the spy bomber’s tanks.

Atlas and Teddy relaxed a little. It wasn’t exactly the time to go back to their reading, but they could have. The plane was flying that perfectly.

That’s why the threat-warning buzzer startled them so. One moment everything was going swimmingly; the next, chaos in the cockpit. Both assumed, in the first half-second of panic, that something was wrong with the refueling. But the warning buzzer was not emanating from anything connected with the aerial fuel hookup. Instead it was coming from the plane’s air defense suite.

The first thing Teddy said was, “This has got to be a glitch.” But they both knew it could not be. The B-2 was virtually glitch-proof. Especially in its defensive systems.

“Shit, we’ve got a launch,” was what Teddy said next. “A hot home….”

Atlas was astonished. They were flying above the island of Fuggu. If what Teddy was reading could be believed, someone below, in the dense jungle, had just fired a radar-guided surface-to-air missile at them.

The pilots glared at each other—just for a second. They had identical looks: What the hell do we do now?

Finally they went into action, but time was not on their side. Teddy frantically called the guys in the tanker, this while Atlas began to manually unhook from the tanker. But it was too late; this was a monster missile coming up at them and it was traveling very fast. Atlas tore his eyes off his controls, just for a second, to look out the window into the night—just to see if this was real. He saw a huge fireball climbing toward them. It was barely 500 feet away.

Could anyone be this unlucky? Even with the missile, just seconds before impact, the irony was as bright as its exhaust plume. Atlas and Teddy knew the SAM wasn’t going to hit them. Their radar signature was less than a marble. The KC-10, however, was like a huge bull’s-eye flying in the sky.

Atlas finally got the B-2F to unhook from the fuel spout. The missile hit the big refueler two seconds later. It exploded in violent slow motion not 30 feet in front of them. The missile had impacted square on the Extender’s belly. There was a white flash, so bright, it blinded Atlas and Teddy. Then the concussion hit. Their control panel’s TV screens blew out, showering both pilots in shards of glass. All of their primary electrical systems shorted out at the same moment. Suddenly the cockpit was filled with sparks. Then came a noise so intense, the headphones inside their crash helmets blew outward. The result was simply deafening.

Through all this, Atlas managed to yank the flying wing to the left, this as the conflagration that was the tanker slid off to the right.

The B-2F went right over onto its back, not something allowed by the flight envelope of the bat wing. Going inverted added to the confusion of the moment, but again Atlas came through. With great strength, he slowly turned the plane back over again. The strain on the engines proved too much, though. They began coughing. Atlas applied power but then looked down at his flight screen and saw through it that their third crew member—Hal the computer—was dead, killed by the concussion of the KC-10’s explosion.

Atlas now fought with the controls, at the same time aware that pieces of the bomber’s wing were coming off. The engines coughed again. Then the plane began spinning.

Atlas was thrown to the back of his seat. His Sports Illustrateds were flying all over the flight compartment. Teddy had his nose pressed up against the cockpit window; he couldn’t move. They were falling like a rock

“Do you see anything flat down there?” Atlas somehow yelled through the smoke and sparks.

But Teddy never replied.