They sat like alien bugs under the shadow of the ship’s giant box-shaped phased-array radar. The six-story-high system was composed of 18,000 antenna elements that collected a wide range of intelligence data on Soviet missile tests with an incredible degree of accuracy. The Ralph R. Bennett had been pulled away from its mission near the Kamchatka Peninsula by presidential order to launch the power gliders and monitor activity in and around Soseki Island.
Lieutenant Commander Raymond Simpson, a man on the young side of thirty with sun-bleached blond hair, stood next to the men from NUMA on the open deck. There was an air of capable toughness about him as he kept a tight eye on his maintenance crew, who swarmed around the tiny aircraft fueling tanks and examining instruments and controls.
“Think we can manage without a check flight?” Pitt asked.
“A piece of cake for old Air Force pilots like yourselves,” answered Simpson lightly. “Once you get the hang of flying while lying on your stomach, you’ll wish you could take one home and keep it for your personal use.”
Pitt had never laid eyes on one of the odd ultralight craft until he and Giordino landed on the ship by an Osprey tilt-motor aircraft an hour before. Now after only forty minutes of class instruction, they were supposed to fly them over a hundred kilometers of open sea and make an injury-free landing on the dangerously rugged surface of Soseki Island.
“How long have these birds been around?” Giordino queried.
“The Ibis X-Twenty,” Simpson corrected him, “is fresh off the drawing boards.”
“Oh, God,” groaned Giordino. “They’re still experimental.”
“Quite so. They haven’t completed their testing program. Sorry I couldn’t have given you something more proven, but your people in Washington were in an awful rush, insisting we deliver them halfway across the world in eighteen hours and all.”
Pitt said consideringly, “They do fly, naturally?”
“Oh, naturally,” Simpson said enthusiastically. “I’ve got ten hours’ flying time in them myself. Super aircraft. Designed for one-man reconnaissance flights. Powered by the very latest in compact turbine engines that provide a three-hundred-kilometer-per-hour cruising speed with a range of a hundred twenty kilometers. The Ibis is the most advanced power glider in the world.”
“Maybe when you get discharged you can open up a dealership,” Giordino said dryly.
“Don’t I wish,” said Simpson without feeling the barb.
The skipper of the radar ship, Commander Wendell Harper, stepped onto the landing pad with a large photo gripped in one hand. Tall and beefy with a solid paunch, Harper’s bowlegged gait gave him the appearance of a man who had just ridden across the Kansas plains for the Pony Express.
“Our meteorology officer promises you’ll have a four-knot tail wind for the flight,” he said pleasantly. “So fuel won’t be a problem.”
Pitt nodded a greeting. “I hope our reconnaissance satellite came up with a decent landing site.”
Harper spread an enlarged computer-enhanced satellite photo up against a bulkhead. “Not exactly O’Hare Airport in Chicago, the only flat spot on the island is a grassy area measuring twenty by sixty meters.”
“Plenty of room for an upwind landing,” Simpson injected optimistically.
Pitt and Giordino moved in and stared at the amazingly detailed picture. The central feature was a landscaped garden clustered around a rectangular lawn that was only open from the east. The other three sides were thickly bordered by trees, shrubbery, and pagoda-roofed buildings with high curved bridges leading down from open balconies to an Oriental pond at one end.
Like condemned men who’d just been told they had a choice of being hanged on the gallows or shot against a wall, Pitt and Giordino looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged tired cynical smiles.
“Hide out until rescued,” Giordino muttered unhappily. “Why do I get the feeling my ballot box has been stuffed?”
“Nothing like arriving at the front door with a brass band,” Pitt agreed.
“Something wrong?” asked Harper innocently.
“Victims of high-pressure salesmanship,” Pitt replied. “Someone in Washington took advantage of our gullible nature.”
Harper looked uneasy. “Do you wish to scrub the operation?”
“No,” Pitt sighed. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”
“I don’t mean to crowd you, but sunset is only an hour away. You’ll need daylight to see your way in.”
At that moment, Simpson’s crew chief came over and informed him the power gliders were serviced and ready for launch.
Pitt looked at the fragile little aircraft. Calling it a glider was a misnomer. Without the strong thrust of its turbine engine, it would drop like a brick. Unlike the high, wide wing of a true ultralight, with its maze of wires and cables, the airfoils on the Ibis were short and stubby and internally braced. It also lacked the ultralight’s canard wing that resisted stalls and spins. He was reminded of the adage about the bumblebee as having all the wrong features for flight, and yet it flew as well as, if not better than, many other insects that Mother Nature had aerodynamically designed.
After finishing their preflight check, the flight crew stood off to the side of the landing pad. In Pitt’s mind they all wore the look of spectators at an auto race anticipating a crash.
“Maybe we can land in time for cocktails,” he said, pulling on his helmet.
With routine calm Giordino merely yawned. “If you get there first, order me a vodka martini straight up.”
Harper incredulously realized that glacial nonchalance was the highest state of emotional nervousness these men were capable of displaying.
“Good luck,” he said, offering both men a firm handshake. “We’ll monitor you all the way. Be sure to activate your signal unit after landing. We’d like to tell Washington you came down safely.”
Pitt gave him a wry smile. “If I’m able.”
“Never a doubt,” Simpson said, as if cheering the home team. “Mind you don’t forget to set the self-destruct timer. Can’t make the Japs a gift of our ultralight technology.”
“Goodbye, and thanks to you and your crews for looking out for us.”
Giordino touched Pitt on the shoulder, gave him an encouraging wink of one eye, and without another word walked toward his craft.
Pitt approached his power glider and eased in from the bottom through a narrow hatch in the fabric-covered fuselage and onto his stomach until his body fit the contours of a body-length foam rubber pad. His head and shoulders were elevated only slightly higher than his legs, elbows swinging free a centimeter above the floor. He adjusted his safety harness and belts that strapped across his shoulder blades and buttocks. Then he inserted his outstretched feet into grips on the vertical stabilizer and brake pedals, and then gripped the stubby control stick in one hand while adjusting the throttle setting with the other.
He waved through the minuscule windscreen at the crew who were standing by to release tie-down cables, and he engaged the starter. The turbine, smaller than a beer keg, slowly increased its whine until it became a high-pitched shriek. He looked over at Giordino, just making out a set of spirited brown eyes. Pitt made a thumbs-up gesture that was returned accompanied with a grin.
One last sweep of the instruments to make sure the engine was functioning as stated in the flight manual, which he barely had time to scan, and a final glimpse at the ensign flapping on the stern under a stiff breeze that beat in from the port side.
Unlike from an aircraft carrier, a forward takeoff was blocked by the great radar housing and the superstructure, so Commander Harper had brought the Bennett around into a quartering wind.
Pitt held the brake on by pressing his toes outward. Then he ran up the throttle, feeling the Ibis try to surge forward. The lip of the landing pad looked uncomfortably close. The lifting force of the Ibis occurred at forty-five kph. The combined wind force and the speed of the Bennett gave him a twenty-five kph running start, but that still left twenty kph to achieve before the landing wheels rolled into air.