Operator B

Dead Man One. It appeases the fates. It nullifies bad luck by giving reverence to it—it’s pilot stuff. We call it The Nix. If you don’t worship The Nix…you’re spam in a can. There won’t be enough left of you for an E-2 crash technician to scrape out of the cockpit with a spatula.”

“The Nix, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Another coy silence, then Ashton’s voice lowered. “You might need a lot more than The Nix to save you now.”

“Think so? We’ll see. I already told you, I’m not taking the mission, whatever it is.”

Silence.

Then, “Oh, you’ll take it, General,” Ashton said. “I guarantee you’ll take it.”

Wentz laughed out lout in his mask. “Keep dreaming, lady! I’m just here for the stick time…”

««—»»

Fifteen minutes later, Wentz keyed his mike. “We’re coming up.”

“All right, General,” Ashton replied. “Slight change of destination. We’re not really going to Nellis.”

“What? So where are we going? Tasty-Freeze?”

“Proceed past Nellis Main Runway 3 to Papoose Lake, seventy-five miles west, southwest.”

Alarmed, Wentz jerked his head around to look at her. “Papoose Lake? That’s a priority no-fly perimeter! I can’t land there!”

Ashton passed forward another plastic envelope. Wentz tore it open and removed a card that read:

4B6: PILOT - (SI) TEKNA/BYMAN/ULTIMA

- COMMAND ORDER -

BYPASS AS INSTRUCTED.

Wentz just shook his head, adjusting the pitch-trim. “Whatever you say, lady.” He kept one eye on the E- scope, then he veered the stick and peeled off toward the new coordinates. The spookshow continues, he thought. Papoose was a lake that had dried up hundreds of years ago, and since Wentz’s first day as a pilot, any aerial passage over the ten-thousand-acre perimeter was strictly prohibited by the FAA, the Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Air Force Security Group Activity. No one knew why but it was easy to guess. A dried-up lake? Thousands of acres of desert? Irradiated waste disposal, or a chemical/biological dump, Wentz presumed.

Below him, the desert stretched endlessly, humped by ridges of sand dunes. “So where am I going to land?” he asked Ashton. “On the sand dunes?”

“There’s a runway. You just can’t see it.”

“What?”

“Switch on your inertial-navigation director and turn your automatic blue-flight toggle to ‘alt.’ Set your heading to four-three-one, then activate auto-pilot.”

Smirking, Wentz did as instructed.

“Now turn on your ECM jammer pod—”

“This is a courier! There’s no ECM on this plane!” Wentz barked.

“No, but there’s something else connected to its console.”

Dismayed, Wentz flipped up the ENABLE switch. Suddenly the sky-toe display snapped on, and—

What the—

—the aircraft began to descend, pivot, and maneuver for landing, all without Wentz doing a thing. Of course, auto-landers existed but were rarely used, and even when they were, it was always necessary for the pilot to visually line up a computer mark with the landing zone.

But, here, there was no landing zone.

All Wentz could see below him were the endless hillocks of sand.

“It’s some kind of a pulse-navaid, isn’t it?” Wentz asked. “It receives emissions from a ground-based VOR and terrain-following radar, then feeds it all into an onboard processor, right?”

“Do you see any radar antennas or VOR dishes, General?”

Wentz strained his eyes. He saw nothing but sand.

“Besides,” Ashton added over the commo line, “a half-hour from now, you’re not even going to care.”

“Still think I’m taking the mission, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Her presumptuousness continued to amuse him to no end, but as the plane’s altitude began to drop, Wentz’s concern rose. She’d said something about a runway that couldn’t be seen. But where? The dunes?

“Where are we going anyway?”

“A base,” Ashton answered.

Wentz stared down. Only sand dunes.

“I don’t see any damn base—”

Then the landing gear began to lower on its own. The flaps dropped, and power began to retard.

“Relax, General,” Ashton said.

Wentz was not relaxed. He began to fidget. After all these years, he’d forgotten how to be afraid.

But now he was remembering again.

When the altimeter read ninety feet, he did something he hadn’t done in decades: he panicked.

“Something’s wrong! The INS must’ve blown its boards!”

“Relax, General,” Ashton calmly repeated.

“We can’t land in sand! I’m going to punch us out—”

“Do NOT eject!” Ashton shouted. “The runway is camouflaged! Do NOT eject!”

Camou— Wentz grit his teeth, staring at the desertscape before him. The tires chirped when the plane touched down. Wentz expected the nose to pitch; he expected an explosion and summary death…

But the plane landed normally in what appeared to be…sand.

Smooth as silk, he thought. “What, the runway—”

“The runway is made of a sand-colored composite,” Ashton said.

“Yeah, but…you can’t see it.”

“That’s the idea.”

Power dwindled to normal taxi speed.

“Disable your ECM switch and take over,” Ashton instructed. “Taxi ahead at zero-forward degrees and keep your eyes peeled for the ground guide.”

Wentz felt stupid, maladroit. Back at the controls, he peered ahead and eventually spotted a man in sand- colored fatigues beckoning them forward with his hands. “I can barely see the guy!”

“Yes, General, and now it’s probably all starting to make some sense.”

A completely subterranean air base? he wondered. Impossible…

The ground guide shoved out his palms—Stop—then made a cut-throat gesture. Wentz braked and shut down the engines.

“What happens now?” he complained to his passenger. “We go play in the dunes? Build a big sand castle?”

The ground began to shake beneath a deep sonorous hum. Wentz remained dumbfounded. Then the ground beneath them, in a long rectangle, began to lower.

A flight elevator, he realized. Like on a carrier, only this was in the desert, part of the desert.

“An underground site,” he said over his mike.

“Yep. Impossible to detect. A lot of those sand dunes are hangar exits. The base has twelve aircraft lifts, all virtually invisible.”