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Sarah Starling, Jason Wilson, Dallas Stone, and Alex Knox clustered in the back of a massive C-5 Galaxy aircraft, having just flown the Jefferson Starship on a chopper from the Hail Nucleus.
They had opened the plane’s rear cargo bay doors, and its ramp rested on the airport’s apron.
“Kind of overkill, don’t you think?” Sarah inquired, staring up into the cavernous cargo bay.
The new Marine pilots Hail had added to his crew walked up toward the cockpit, their backs to the teens. Oliver Fox was tailing them, headed toward a forklift strapped to the floor at the midway point of the aircraft.
“Marshall probably thought it was better to have a plane too big rather than a plane too small,” Jason Wilson suggested.
“Yeah, but this—?” Paige stretched her arms out as if introducing the plane to her friends.
Dallas commented, “Where is a basketball when you need one?”
“Basketball?” Sarah said, “More like football.”
Jason said, “Marshall doesn’t know anything about cargo planes. He probably asked the CIA for a plane. They made a request to the Air Force and this is what arrived.”
Alex Knox was on his phone. He said, “Wiki says it’s an almost outmoded plane built from 1963 to 1968.”
Dallas said, “Damn, wasn’t that when the Wright Brothers tested Kitty Hawk? I hope the avionics have been updated. It would be a bitch to navigate using a sextant and communicate using Morse code.”
The kids laughed.
Still reading Wiki about the C-5, Alex said, “That was crazy you just mentioned the Wright Brothers. There was a line in Wiki that stated the cargo area deck of the C-5 is one foot longer than the entire length of the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
“That is weird,” Dallas agreed.
Alex went on, “And Wiki says this monstrosity’s cargo bay can fit an entire LGM-30 Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile within its container.”
Sarah said, “Now it would be cool to have one of those.”
“Yeah, a missile designed in the 1950s toted around in a plane made in the 1960s. That’s just what the doctor ordered.”
Having researched more about the C-5, Alex said, “This is funny. The pilots who fly these things refer to the planes as FRED, which stands for F-ing Ridiculous Economic/Environmental Disaster.”
The kids laughed nervously, finding the factoid a little unsettling.
Near the front of the plane, the small forklift began moving down the middle of the plane, headed toward them. The kids watched as Oliver drove the machine down the long metal ramp.
“Galaxy is delivering a Starship. It has kind of a poetic flavor to it, don’t you think?” Sarah asked.
Alex said, “Too bad it wasn’t the equally ancient Lockheed C-141 Starlifter. Then you would have a Starlifter lifting a Starship.”
Oliver carefully drove the forklift’s prongs under the drone. He tilted the prongs back a few degrees and lifted the 2,000-pound contraption up a foot or two. Oliver maneuvered in a small tight circle before he drove up the ramp with the cone-shaped Starship riding steadily on the forks.
Over the next ten minutes, the group used the plane’s tie downs and straps to secure their creation for the flight to Pakistan. As they cinched down the last of the straps to the cargo rings on the floor of the aircraft, Hail’s new pilots had already started spinning up the plane’s F138 engines.
With the kids’ portion of the delivery finished, the four crewmembers disembarked from the Galaxy and climbed into Hail’s AgustaWestland chopper. Minutes later they were airborne and headed back to the Hail Nucleus to catch some shut-eye. In less than six hours, they would be sitting in the ship’s mission center and uplinked to the leased communications satellite, ready to see if Jefferson Starship could deliver the acid rounds and other deterrents during a critical tactical mission.