Blue Gold (NUMA Files 2)

Holding his breath, he hit the ignition switches for the engines one at a time. The turbines began with a throaty rumble and worked themselves up to a high pitch. Satisfied that the engines were working, he waved at Austin, who stood next to the wall. Austin waved back.

As Zavala jumped into the copilot’s seat and adjusted the fuel feed, Austin hit the wall switch. A thin line of daylight began to shine under the rising door. Kurt dashed beneath the plane and disconnected the umbilical. Then, using the sledgehammer he had set aside for the task, he knocked the wooden wheel chocks away. Austin groped his way through the smoke, pulled himself into the plane, and battened the hatch.

The hot exhaust from engines blasted the rear of the building. Anything not nailed down was blown against the wall by the tremendous force or melted by the intense heat. The noise was so loud it was almost impossible to think, and hot, choking fumes and smoke filled the hangar.

Austin crashed, gasping for breath, into the copilot’s seat. “She’s all yours, pal.”

Zavala gave him the thumbs-up sign. “She’s a little cranky but not bad for an old gal.”

Zavala’s eyes were glued on the rising door. He kept the brakes set and pushed each throttle forward until they were at full power. If they had the luxury of a full crew, Zavala would have relied on a flight engineer to tell him if the engines were running the way they should, but the best he could do was rely on his experienced ear. It was impossible to distinguish individual engines, but the unbroken roar was a good sign.

The door seemed to catch for an instant, then it pulled free. He released the brakes, and the plane lurched forward. Zavala pushed the throttle levers smoothly forward and let out a rebel yell as the power from thousands of pounds of thrust pushed the plane out into the open, but his jubilation was short-lived.

The big green helicopter was directly in the line of takeoff. The helicopter had landed after blasting the second hole, and now it sat on the tundra about a half mile away. Men in dark green uniforms were outside the hangar preparing for an assault when the wing emerged like a monstrous black bird hatching from its egg. Their surprise quickly turned to terror, and they scattered like leaves before the wind.

The helicopter pilot was leaning against the chopper smoking a cigarette when he saw the monstrous aircraft bearing down in his direction. He jumped back into the helicopter, where he was faced with an immediate decision. He could stay where he was and be rammed. He could fire his rockets or guns at the oncoming wing and hope that his hurried shots would hit the slim fuselage. Or he could head for the sky.

Austin was distracted by the sound of a giant woodpecker rapping on the fuselage. Zavala thought it was one of the engines falling apart and was only partially relieved when Austin said, “They’re shooting at us. Are you going to fly this rig or drive it all the way to Nome?”

Because of the unusual position of the instrument panel, Zavala could not see all the gauges. Aiming for the helicopter to keep the plane on a straight line, Zavala shouted at Austin to call out the air speed

.

“Forty!” Austin yelled.

Zavala was surprised at how quickly the plane accelerated, despite its huge mass and the partially deflated tires. He had to maintain a firm hand on the controls to keep the nose from lifting.

“Sixty!”

The landing gear hit the water of the shallow lake, but the plane’s speed continued to increase.

“Eighty!”

Even as Austin called out, Zavala felt the lightness on the wheel indicating that the plane was near takeoff speed.

“One hundred!”

Zavala counted to ten, then pulled back on the wheel. Both men practically drove their feet through the floorboards as they pressed on imaginary accelerators. The massive plane seemed to leap into the air. Zavala had assumed that they would easily clear the helicopter, but once the plane was up at an angle all he could see was blue sky.

The helicopter pilot had finally chosen a course of action, but it was the wrong one. He mistakenly assumed that the huge bat-shaped aircraft lumbering across the permafrost in his direction would hit the chopper on the ground. He lifted off about the same time Zavala got the wing airborne.

From his level in the copilot’s seat, Austin had a clear view of the chopper rising into the path of the flying wing. Unaware of the impending collision, Zavala had been concentrating on the takeoff. From his reading Zavala knew that the wing’s rapid acceleration would blow the covers off the slow-moving landing gear. The gear had been designed for slower-moving propeller-driven planes and took too long to retract. Pilots compensated by retracting the gear while the plane was only a few hundred feet off the ground and pulling the nose up at a fairly steep angle.

If not for the unusual maneuver the aircraft would have collided. Instead they missed by several feet, but there was a horrendous metallic crunch as the landing gear grazed the whirling rotors. The rotors disintegrated, and the helicopter seemed to hang for a moment before it plummeted back to the ground, where it exploded in a ball of flame. The wing wobbled from the impact, but Zavala got it back under control. He kept climbing before he leveled off at five thousand feet.

Zavala realized he had forgotten to breathe. He puffed out his cheeks and gulped air into his lungs so quickly the effort made him dizzy. Austin asked him to do a damage check. He did a visual inspection of the plane from his perch. The fuselage was riddled with bullet holes. Scraps of aluminum continued to peel off, and a second engine was starting to smoke.

“She looks like a wedge of Swiss cheese, but she’s a tough old bird.”

He put the flying wing on a course that would take them into the vicinity of Nome. There was no need for altitude, and he kept the plane at a few thousand feet. After a while he started laughing.

“What’s so funny, compadre?” Austin called out from his perch, where he was fiddling with the radio.

“I was just wondering what they’re going to say when we come tooling in all shot up with a fifty-year-old stealth bomber.”

“Simple. We’ll say we were flying a mission and were kidnapped by a UFO.”

Zavala shook his head. “That’s almost as unbelievable as the real story,” he said.