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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 101: Kondor 289
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Slade 284
Passing the statue of a Lancaster bomber, Kondor decided that this ‘secret air base’ was not that secret. They were fifty miles outside London and just entering the airbase. Getting closer to the hangars he saw that it was labeled as an ‘air museum’ so he understood now: pretend to be a museum, but in actuality be an operating air base.
Turning into the hangar, he got out as did Theodore from the solid black truck, or lorry. Several distrustful looking men came up across the grease-stained concrete, and one forced a smile.
“I’m sorry, this hangar is closed to the public. We hope to open it early next year.” Kondor was willing to bet that next year the spiel would be the exact same.
“York,” Theodore said. All the men in their approaching V formation came to a halt, and then one spoke.
“White rose.”
“Dover.”
“White horse king.”
With the signs and countersigns exchanged, the five men relaxed from their careful pretense of being relaxed, and smiled.
“What can we do for you gents?”
“This man needs a Sabu Backpack Pod for himself and his cycle. Soonest.”
The unnamed man who had done all the speaking so far, the evident if quiet leader, turned to study Kondor.
“Soonest is what we do, sir. Are you sure you’re up for this? It's fairly straightforward, but in tests we’ve had one in three serious casualties. Plus, if you’re going the type of places we usually go, any serious casualty is going to quickly turn to a mortality as the locals are rarely friendly.”
“Yes,” Kondor said calmly. He was a verser. Still he wondered what he had signed in for. Five minutes later, he found out as a SR-71 Blackhawk, called by its pilots the Sabu, rolled through a hidden set of doors in the back of the hangar and into the publicly accessible hangar space.
It was a huge black dart with what looked like rockets on its wings. Still, as he saw two pilots getting dressed to ride up front, he wondered where he and his bike were to go. When a crane built into the ceiling pulled a large black box slanting on the front from the hidden back areas to come out along a ceiling track over the Blackhawk, and past it to lower to the concrete near him, he got his answer.
He was going to ride in the backpack.
This was getting a bit real. Then they handed him a pile of papers to sign attesting that he had asked for this in case he experienced any of the following conditions: death by freezing, hypoxia (lack of oxygen his medical training filled in), excessive heat, flame, unplanned early detachment of pod over the ocean, failure to open one of three parachutes, air turbulence causing g-forces and passing out, hallucinations, panic attacks, and other ill understood conditions.
It actually said in government bureaucratese ‘ill understood conditions’. He shrugged, and signed it.
“Braver than I,” said the co-pilot, who drove a plane that flew way past the speed of sound at the edge of space, after taking the papers back to be filed and forgotten unless he decided in the future to sue Her Majesty’s government for mistreatment. In the event of his doing so, he rather expected C to have him assassinated.
The Backpack was fifteen feet wide and four feet tall. The top was detached and the interior spaces rearranged as Kondor was being space suited. His bike went in first on its side, and he went next, facing his bike, but with a blank wall facing him. There were options for sticking in sheets of material for him to read, but he found them stupid and objectionable. He did not need the Lord’s Prayer, or the Soldier’s Prayer, or Psalms 23. He would take nothing over false hope.
The top was screwed down, and he was breathing suit air, and there were small lights so he could look around, but his body was braced. After a check on the radio, they turned the radio off so as to not have him make signals. After this point, he was committed. The crane screeched slightly as it lifted him, and swaying gently he was moved to the top of the Sabu where the Backpack Pod was lowered. He heard some shrieks of metal as bolts that would have to be explosively decoupled were affixed to the tiny rack that held him off the Sabu’s skin.
An airfoil was dropped to keep the air from between him and the plane, or so he had been told when they described the planned procedures for the flight before he got boxed in. Soon enough, the engines started running, and one small mercy came as the vehicle rolled forward. A small lighted screen glowed near his head which told him of his speed.
Currently, it was one kilometer per hour as the Sabu rolled out to the runway. He was morally certain it would get a lot faster before this ride was over.
They were headed to the Himalayas, based on his own scriff sensing, triangulation, and geometry. The plan was to parachute him into a mountain valley next to the one with the target facility, which was protected with the formidable ZSU anti-aircraft gun system. Upon landing, he would bike up a ‘trail’ for certain values of the word trail, and pass down into the adjoining valley where he would accomplish the objective of retrieving or destroying the devices. First though, he was to destroy the radar controls so that the Reptile House team could do a HALO (high altitude low opening) parachute drop which would be hard enough in the thin mountain air, and likely fatal if they had to run into ZSU’s with their four barrel autocannons.
“No pressure,” he said as the engines warmed up, and the Sabu started moving down the runway. First ten, then twenty, fourty, seventy, a hundred twenty, one eighty, two-ten, and suddenly they were up, and Kondor felt his stomach lurch. After that, the odometer clicked on, as did the altimeter. The speed went up by leaps and bounds, passing Mach One at four thousand feet, and Mach Three at six thousand feet before slowing slightly in its climb upward. Two minutes to pass Mach Four and thirty thousand feet, and Mach Five and fifty thousand feet took another five minutes. But they kept rising, reforging the plane in the heat of the blistering air, and now more slowly as they crossed Mach Six, and then Seven at 63,241 feet. The air speed indicator in miles per hour was bobbling real close to 4,621-23-20-19-20-19-21-22-22-23-22 miles per hour. His trip on the Sabu was going to take just a few minutes longer than an hour.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
