'I'm serious.'
'I am listening, my friend. You're paying for this call.'
Captain Kathleen Sullivan was the duty officer in the operations center at Space Command, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when one of the enlisted technicians called her over to his computer console.
'We were processing data from the equatorial satellite when the computer found an anomaly, Captain. I think you should take a look at this.'
'Okay,' Captain Sullivan said.
'The area we are looking at is the Sahara, on the border between Libya and Chad. The computer says the area of interest is a few meters inside Libya, but as I recall, the exact border has never been formally agreed upon.'
'What do you have?' Sullivan asked brusquely. She was in no mood for a long wind-up.
'This.' The sergeant punched a key on the computer keyboard and a picture appeared. He used a track ball to make the picture larger, and larger, and larger. In the center was a perfect circle. The sergeant stood back from the console with his hands behind his back.
'That circular shape is made of metal, is highly reflective, is about twenty meters in diameter, and wasn't there four days ago on the satellite's last look at that area.'
Sullivan leaned close to the computer screen. 'This is a new one on me,' she muttered.
'Yes, ma'am,' the sergeant agreed. 'Me too. If I didn't know better, I'd say the damn thing is a flying saucer.'
'Or the top of a water tank.'
'There? In the middle of the Sahara?' The sergeant reached for the computer keyboard. 'There is one vehicle near it and one small piece of wheeled equipment.'
'People?'
'At least one, perhaps two. If we had a little better angle on the sun we might have gotten a shadow…'
Sullivan straightened up and frowned. 'You don't believe in flying saucers, do you?'
'I have an open mind, Captain. An open mind. I'm just saying that circular shape looks like a saucer. It could be a water tank. It could be the top of a nuclear reactor. It could be a twenty-meter metal sunshade for the queen of England's garden party.'
Sullivan picked up a notepad, jotted a series of numbers off the computer screen, then tore off the sheet of paper.
'Thank you, Sergeant,' she said and walked back to her office.
'Since I'm not an officer,' the sergeant muttered under his breath, 'I can believe any damned thing I want. Sir.'
Captain Sullivan consulted the telephone number list taped to her desk, then dialed a secure telephone. After two rings, a male voice answered.
She explained about the anomaly and dictated the latitude and longitude coordinates. She was very careful not to label the anomaly a flying saucer. 'It appears to be the top of a water tank, but it's in an empty, barren godforsaken place. I suggest, sir, that we request a more thorough examination of this site.'
'Libya?'
'Near the place where the borders of Libya, Chad, and Sudan come together.'
'I'll be down for a look in five minutes.'
Exactly six and a half minutes later, the general was leaning over the sergeant's shoulder while Captain Sullivan watched from several paces away.
'We're doing an initial analysis before we send this data to NIMA,' she explained. NIMA was the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which collected, analyzed, and distributed imagery for the various agencies of the U.S. government.
'Hmm,' said the general.
'Yes, sir,' the sergeant agreed flippantly.
'What do you think it is, Sergeant?'
'Looks like a flying saucer to me, General, but I just work here.'
'Darned if it don't,' the general said. He straightened, checked the lat/long coordinates on the screen, nodded at Captain Sullivan, then walked away.
In less than an hour a computer printer spit out a sheet of paper in a windowless office on the ground floor of a hangar in Nevada, at an airfield that wasn't on any map, in a place known only as Area 51.
Two hours later a pilot wearing a helmet and full pressure suit manned an airplane that had just been pushed from the hangar. The airplane was all black and shaped like a wedge, with seventy-five degrees of wing sweep. An enlisted crew helped the pilot get into the cockpit, then strapped and plugged him in.
The airplane was receiving electrical power from a piece of yellow gear. The pilot set up his cockpit switches, then spent fifteen minutes waiting.
Only when the minute hand of his wristwatch was exactly on the hour did he signal the ground crew for an engine start.
Precisely ten minutes later he advanced the throttles of his four rocket-based, combined-cycle engines and released the brakes. The noise from the engines almost ripped the sky apart. Even snuggled in the cockpit under a well-padded helmet, the pilot found the noise painfully loud.
As he rolled down the runway, the engines were burning a mixture of compressed air and methane, augmented with liquid oxygen. As the plane accelerated, the mixture would be automatically juggled to maintain power.
The spy plane rolled on the fourteen thousand-foot runway for a long time before it lifted off. With a flick of a switch the pilot retracted the gear. Then he pulled the nose up steeply and climbed away at a forty-five-degree angle. Passing Mach 2, the pilot toggled a lever that hydraulically lifted an opaque metal screen to cover the windshield and protect it. He had been using computer displays as his primary flight reference since liftoff, so being deprived of an outside view was of no practical consequence.
He watched his airspeed carefully, and at Mach 2.5 monitored the computer-controlled transition to pure ramjet flight. The air compressor inlet doors were closed and the flow of LOX secured. When the transition was complete, methane burning in the free airflow through the four ramjets provided the aircraft's propulsion. Fifteen minutes after lifting off, the plane leveled at one hundred twenty-five thousand feet above the earth and accelerated to fifty-four hundred miles per hour.
The pilot kept a careful eye on the computer screen that displayed the temperature of various portions of his aircraft. He was especially vigilant about the temperatures of the leading edges of the wings, which he knew were glowing a cherry red even though he couldn't see them.
Despite the deafening roar of the engines and the shock wave that trailed for miles behind the hypersonic plane, a placid calm had descended upon the cockpit. Engine noise reached the pilot only through the airframe. Amazingly, almost none of this noise reached the ground. The sonic wave of aircraft flying above one hundred thousand feet dissipated before reaching the ground, as did ninety-nine percent of the engine noise. And at this altitude the stealthy plane was invisible to radar and human eyes. Only infrared sensors trained skyward could detect it, and there were few of those.
The pilot ensured that his two Global Positioning System (GPS) devices agreed with each other, then coupled the primary autopilot to one of them. The autopilot would take him to the first tanker rendezvous over the Atlantic. He would drop down to thirty thousand feet and slow to subsonic speed on the turbine engines to refuel from a KC-135 tanker, then climb back to altitude while accelerating to hypersonic cruise for the flight across Africa.
The night would not yet have passed when he arrived over the central Sahara, but no matter. His synthetic- aperture radar could see through darkness, clouds, or smoke. The digital signals would be encrypted and transmitted via satellite to NIMA for processing into extraordinarily detailed images.
With its mission in the Sahara complete, the hypersonic spy plane would make another pass over the Mideast — this pilot made the Mideast run at least once a week — then turn and head for a second tanker rendezvous west of the Azores on the way back to Nevada.
Just another day at the office, the pilot told himself, and tried to make himself comfortable in his padded seat.
