Roswell Fanatics

Flight 526
16 nautical miles southeast of Albuquerque

The aircraft climbed up in o the night sky leaving the lights of Santa Fe and Albuquerque behind it as it climbed up into the inky darkness of the sparsely populated southeast corner of New Mexico. The trip would be a short one - fifty minutes – at the 280 knots the Beechcraft was capable of – and Ned Harris was impatient to get back in the cabin. Finally Departure Control turned them over to the center and the pilot workload became sufficiently routine that Ned trusted even Joe Hendershott – definitely not the best first officer he'd ever seen – to handle the aircraft while he went back in the cabin.

To Ned it seemed a safe enough bet. The weather forecast had been good – the aircraft was working normally – hell, the thing was on autopilot. It would even level itself out when they reached the assigned altitude of FL 230. All Hendershott had to do was keep a listening watch on the radio and notify Ned if anything went wrong. How much trouble could the guy get in to? He'd only be ten feet away. He wouldn't even need to put on the quick-don oxygen mask – a requirement if one of the pilots left the cockpit above 25000 feet because of the threat of sudden incapacitation if the aircraft were to depressurize. Ned Harris just didn't see how the newest first officer in the company could foul this up.

“I'm going back to the cabin for a minute,” said Ned, checking carefully that everything was alright before leaving. “If you have any problem – any problem at all, I want to know about it.”

As Ned left, Joe Hendershott looked over his shoulder. He was aware that he hadn't really 'wowed' Captain Harris, but he thought he'd done OK. He wanted, Joe decided, to project an image of confidence. All he really had to do was to get through this flight with Harris. He'd already picked up a lot of information – like about the anti-skid and the stability augmentation system. Over the next month he'd fly with probably a dozen different captains. If he could simply pick their brains – learn things like he had on this flight – pretty soon he'd actually have the background he had claimed he had on his resume'. Hell, here he was sitting alone in the cockpit – and everything was going just fine.

Max looked forward – wondering if Liz was feeling any better – but he couldn't see her. He'd actually considered sitting next to her – taking the place Lexie had vacated – but it just hadn't worked out. He'd gone back to get his carry-on and to take the 'Occupied/Occupado' combination sign and barf-bag off his old seat when he'd found that the rear four seats had been moved forward and a pile of luggage netted in behind them. He thought at first that his own carry-on was in the pile, but had eventually found it on the overhead rack. By that time a whole bunch of other people had loaded and one of the two women had taken the seat vacated by Lexie and … eventually Max had just decided to sit down in the seat that was under his carry-on bag since he could no longer sit next to her anyway.

He wasn't going to have that talk with her that Lexie had told him to … not yet anyway... and maybe not at all. Lexie was well-intentioned – but she couldn't understand – not without knowing just how different he was. Maybe he would talk to Liz …. maybe they could still be friends. But that wasn't going to happen on this flight – not with the current seating arrangements – and that was probably just as well. He couldn't have had more than three hours sleep in the last thirty-six, he'd been in a fight, and he'd had a stun gun used on him at least five times. He was tired to his very bones. He'd have to think about talking to Liz some other time.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep but memories of Liz dancing with the other guys last night kept intruding. He wasn't sure why that bothered him so much, it was after all, just what he had wanted. He had the pictures and Alex would put them in the school newspaper and everyone would understand that Liz Parker was available – that Max Evans had no claim on her. That was what he had wanted... wasn't it?


Liz peered over her shoulder – looking back inn the cabin. She couldn't see Max, but she knew where he was. He'd been sitting on the right side – almost at the back – when she'd climbed up the stairway to board the aircraft. She'd even considered going back and sitting next to him but hadn't done it. She knew she'd promised Lexie, but she still had no idea how to start the sort of talk that Lexie had told her to have. Things were so.....complicated. They'd been so great just eighteen months ago – when she'd worked side by side with him on their summer paleontology job... how had things gotten so fouled up? The question was a rhetorical one. She knew damn well how – she'd pushed him about dating, and from that one conversation her life had gone completely downhill. What wouldn't she give to have that one moment to do over again?
Liz closed her eyes – not wanting to think about that. In fact, she didn't want to think about anything. In the last twenty-four hours she'd been drugged, been beaten, almost died of an alcohol overdose, then had to put up with the shame of having found out how cruelly she'd treated Max at the dance – something she didn't even remember doing. She felt like hell and the very best thing, she decided, was to just try to get some rest. In an hour she'd be back in Roswell and in two hours she intended to be in her own bed in her own snuggy pajamas and she could figure out what to do to make amends to Max – if that was even possible – tomorrow after she'd had a good nights sleep.


Aboard Ghostrider 25
Ten Miles South of Elida, New Mexico

Rabbit continued the descent, watching his instruments carefully. It should have been possible to see the lights of Roswell New Mexico by now – but those lights were nowhere to be seen. That's because 2 minutes ago he'd run into cloud – cloud that wasn't forecast to be in the area at all, much less at 30,000 feet. The F-117A has the 'F' designation of a fighter aircraft, but really it's an attack aircraft. It's only offensive weapons are bombs which it delivers through the use of a forward looking infrared screen for flying and a downward looking infrared panel for actually seeing downward so a laser could be aimed to guide the bombs. It was an aircraft built for one particular niche – to go in at night and drop bombs undetected by radar. Right now it could be detected of course. An antenna on the belly of the aircraft would sense the impact of a radar wave and a transponder would send a stronger wave back. In combat that antenna – and all antennas – would be retracted and the radar waves would either be reflected back in a direction different than the detector or absorbed by the radar absorbent material that coated the skin of the aircraft.

But the point was – the F-117A did not have an airborne radar like the F-15 or the F-16 or the F-22 he would soon be learning how to fly. True, the radar on those aircraft were optimized for finding other aircraft and aiming the missiles and guns that those aircraft had that the F-117A did not – but even so. With those you could at least get SOME idea of the weather in front of you. In the F-117A you had nothing.

Rabbit keyed the mike, “Center, Ghostrider 25 – I am in cloud at Flight level 290 and also picking up some turbulence in the descent. Does your radar show any convective activity in the area?”

“That's a negative, Ghostrider. Of course, you're sort of in the middle of nowhere. The NEXRAD site in Alamogordo doesn't cover that area due to high terrain between you and them. We've got nothing forecast or reported though.”

“Ghostrider copies. If this keeps up I may be requesting a course deviation though.”

“Roger Ghostrider – keep us advised.”

OK, thought Rabbit. Maybe I'm being a little paranoid here. The clouds aren't really that thick. Surely if there was going to be a thunderstorm, somebody would have forecast it – hell – somebody would have seen it. Probably this is just some high stratus – nothing to worry about.

The truth is, Rabbit was whistling past the graveyard and he knew it. If he could actually look ahead – if it wasn't already too dark – he'd know if a thunderstorm was out there. If he had a radar he'd know too. But not only didn't he know, if there was one he didn't know which way to divert. He was as likely to deviate into the storm as he was to deviate away from it – assuming it was really there at all. The GPS said he was now almost at Roswell which meant if he continued on his present heading he'd be parking the aircraft in the chocks in less than a half hour. It was as good a course of action as any – given the information he had.

Flight 526
20 nautical miles southeast of Albuquerque

The autopilot was flying the aircraft and he had little to do but monitor the instruments. Since the Captain had gone back in the passenger cabin, that gave Joe Hendershott time to familiarize himself with some of the secondary equipment - the stuff that the little aircraft he had actually flown didn't have. His orientation training had briefly covered the weather radar that was standard in the Beechcraft 1900 but that was about it. He had a small booklet to read and a DVD he was supposed to watch about that - but he really hadn't had the time yet. The controls seemed simple enough as he looked at the screen. The range now said 20 NM - twenty nautical miles - and the scope was all black indicating no radar returns. As he turned it to 40 NM nothing changed, at 80 NM however, he saw a luminous green edge start to form and at 160 NM this luminous green cloud occupied about a 20 degree swath in front of them - directly on their course to Roswell.

Hendershott started to key the PA - to ask the Captain to come back forward - but then he hesitated. He really didn't understand what the radar return meant - what if he were calling him back for nothing? They were still climbing - just doing 180 knots. At three miles a minute they were still almost twenty minutes away from the luminous mass on the screen. It would be better, he decided, to turn the scope back to 20 NM like he found it - wait for the Captain to be back in his seat - then casually turn the range on the radar back to where it showed the mass when Harris was seated in the cockpit. Then Joe could say, 'Look at that...,' casually, and assess his reaction.

Yes, thought Joe, that was the prudent thing to do. Whatever the Captain was doing back in the cabin, he certainly wouldn't be back there long...

In fact, as Ned Harris left the cockpit and entered the cabin he really didn't expect to be back there long. He expected that his job - to give the pistols in his flight bag back to the bodyguards that protected Ramon Valencia and Francisco Calderon - would be brief, and as soon as he did that he would return to the cockpit to do a few more things in the 'climb' checklist.

Not urgent things - it was a beautiful night with no forecast weather - but just the routine things you did on a night like this - like unlocking the radar antenna and giving the intended flight path a real good look. Sometimes in the desert there would be some convective activity at night - small thunderbumpers not forecast and unlikely to cause any real problems but potentially annoying to the passengers - so you always swept the area ahead to look for them. The radar antenna was in the nose - a dish like affair that scanned back and forth - gimballed to scan a little bit up and down as well. You always locked it on the ground - so the vibrations from the bumps you hit on these shitty little runways didn't ruin the scanning servos of the up-down part. The other servos - the azimuth ones - were pretty rugged. The up down - scan was for situations - well, much like this one actually. With the aircraft in a climb - the radar didn't shoot out horizontally. Instead the beam pointed upwards along the axis of the aircraft. If the radar were used without unlocking it now - well, it would be pointing quite high. It might shoot right over a small area of storm - or just catch the very top of a much larger one. Theoretically, you could be almost on top of a storm before you even noticed with the radar antenna stowed.

Of course Ned wasn't consciously thinking about the radar - it was just a flag in the back of his mind that he still had things to attend to once he got back in the cockpit. Like I said, he didn't expect to be back there long.

As he came through the door and looked at the passenger compartment he saw a slight problem though. The teenage girl in the right front seat. Beside her sat - he wasn't sure of her name - one of the mistresses of either Francisco or Mr. Valencia - she was no problem. Behind the two of them sat the other mistress and beside her an empty seat. Valencia and Calderone sat next to each other in the row behind her - they always sat next to each other - planning their next step in taking over rival cartels - and in the two rows behind them the four bodyguards. Nothing suave or cultured about them, just cheap strong 'muscle' from the slums of Juarez. Way in the back sat the other teenager going to Roswell who looked half asleep.

The teenage girl was the problem, of course. Maybe he could have gotten away with handing the pistols to the four guys - but what if she happened to wander back to talk to the other kid. She had to know him - Roswell wasn't that big a town and they seemed the same age. Better not to take the chance, thought Ned. Better to send her back there and get her out of the way.

For five minutes Liz had been regretting the fact that she'd put her jacket up in the overhead. The walk from the terminal had been cold and she was still worn out from the adventures of the last - could it really have been only twenty-three hours since the dance? But with the tiny blanket she'd taken down from the overhead wrapped around her and the heat from the engines finally warming up the cold-soaked cabin she was finally starting to get comfortable. Well, not comfortable comfortable - she was still bruised in the abdomen, still had IV punctures inside both elbows, and still ached all over, but she was at least relatively comfortable when the pilot came back into the cabin. He looked around a minute, and to Liz's complete surprise tapped her on the shoulder.

"Miss," said Harris,"....I need for you to move back to the back of the aircraft."

It wasn't just that Liz was barely starting to get comfortable - it was that even though she had promised Lexie to have that talk with Max, she knew she wasn't ready for it. She didn't want to chance that conversation starting here - now - in a noisy aircraft - when she felt terrible to begin with.

"Why?" she asked.

"It has to do with weight and balance of the aircraft. We need more weight toward the back."

That made no sense to Miss Scientist. The aircraft weighed six tons and she weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her walking thirty feet back was going to do nothing for the weight and damn little for the balance. Getting one of those big guys in back to move further back would have made a lot bigger difference in the moment arm of the aircraft. Besides.... there was already a stack of baggage lashed to the back bulkhead. Liz found it impossible to believe that the physics of this made any sense - and she desperately didn't want to go back and have to start the conversation with Max feeling like she did.

"Why don't you have her go back?" said Liz, indicating the woman in the seat beside her, "...or one of the big guys in back?"

Flight Level 260 over Roswell New Mexico
Aboard Ghostrider 25

Statistics are a funny thing. Statistically, the expectation when you throw a pair of dice is that you'll get a total of seven. Of course, that expectation comes from the expectation that each of the dice will have a value of 3.5 - the total number of dots on each side (6+5+4+3+2+1) = 21, divided by six sides, equalling 3.5. The reality is that you don't generally get the expectation - you get a probability distribution that tends to center around the expectation. The more extreme results - snake eyes and box cars in the example given - you will still get one time out of every thirty-six rolls - a little less than three percent of the time.

That seems to carry through to nature too - a rattlesnake will USUALLY rattle before he strikes and a thunderstorm at night will USUALLY have a few lightning strikes off in the distance before you fly in to it and get hit by one - but apparently not tonight.

WHAMM!!!!

Rabbit was temporarily blinded by the flash and, as he fought desperately to see through the green after-images left on his retina from the lightning strike that had hit the aircraft, the woman's voice started in his headset. Thirty years ago somebody had done studies and discovered that a woman's voice was more likely to break through any distractions and call attention to a problem. That's why a recorded - and now a synthesized - womans voice was used by the auditory emergency warning system. Of course none of the fighter pilots called it that - they called it 'bitching Betty.'

"Warning - Master Caution Light on," said Betty.
"Warning - right generator off line," said Betty.
"Warning - left generator off line," said Betty.
"Warning - autopilot disconnected, said Betty.

Rabbit cursed and turned up the cabin lights, struggling to get things under control. The very first thing he needed to do was to find the button to shut off Bitching Betty, so he could think.


Twenty-eight miles south of Albuquerque
Mesa Flight 526

'Well that's just friggin' great,' thought Ned Harris, '...most of the kids in the damn country don't know squat about physics, and I get one that probably knows more about weight and balance than the worthless damn copilot.' Of course, when you were the Captain -even of a tiny little airliner like this one, you weren't obligated to take crap from anyone, even if they were right.

"Miss, 49 U.S.C. paragraph 46501 of the federal code makes it a felony to interfere with an aircrewmember in the performance of his duties. My duty right now is to get the weight and balance of this aircraft straightened out. You will either comply with that request, or I will turn this aircraft around and go back to Albuquerque and have you removed. Then you can explain your actions to the federal agents there while I take everybody else to Roswell and El Paso. Is that really what you want?"

Liz shook her head - more annoyed than angry. She just wanted this trip over - wanted to be back home where she could get a good night's sleep and then - in the morning - start to put her life back together. She looked towards the back - at least Max seemed to be asleep.

She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and started back toward the rear of the aircraft. As she passed the last row of large men one of them said something about her to the guy in front of him. Liz didn't really speak fluent Spanish, but like most teenagers in a border state, she knew quite a bit. The comment had been about her ... and quite vulgar. Somehow sitting next to a sleeping Max Evans had just become a much better idea. Whatever the problem was between them - and she still hadn't figured that out - he sure did his best to protect her. That was something, anyway.

She quietly slid into the seat that was separated from his only by the narrow aisle and wrapped the blanket back around herself, no longer even concerned about the big vulgar man sitting forward. Soon she was asleep herself, before she really even noticed just how 'right' sleeping beside him seemed to be.....

Roswell International Airport
Roswell New Mexico

The night sky was lit up as if by a huge flashbulb and it was less than a second later when the thunder hit.

WHAMM!!!!

The eyes of the two would-be passengers standing at the Mesa ticket counter checking their baggage suddenly got huge and they looked out the window. What had been a gentle drizzle was now turning to sheets of rain blowing against the window while outside by the runway the lighted windsock was whipping as if to tear itself from its moorings.

The two were scheduled to catch Mesa Flight 526, but they seemed to be having second thoughts about it. "We aren't going to fly in THAT, are we?" asked the man. He and his wife were scheduled to fly to El Paso to catch a 'real plane' to fly to Los Angeles to meet their son and daughter and law and take their two grandchildren to Disneyland. Suddenly, driving to El Paso and taking a later flight seemed like a better option.

The ticketing agent - also baggage agent and customer relations, this wasn't a big operation - was sympathetic and reassuring.

"This may just be a real local phenomenon. There was no serious weather forecast for today."

"It looks serious enough to me," said the man's wife.

"What I mean by that is that - well this may just be passing through. We have well trained pilots and well-equipped aircraft. The pilot will see this on the radar and if it is just a small squall passing through he may well just hold north of here until it dissipates. If it's bigger, he'll probably go back to Albuquerque. They just refueled up in Albuquerque - they have plenty of fuel and no need to enter this weather at all. If they had to they could even skip Roswell altogether and go right to El Paso. We'll get a call from the Phoenix office if they don't think they can make it in here at all. If that's the case, I'd expect it in the next half hour or so....."

The two sets of parents sitting in the waiting area adjacent to the ticket counter heard this exchange, of course. Perhaps it was somewhat reassuring - but not entirely so.

"I wish they were here - on the ground," said Nancy Parker looking out at the whipping windsock. Jeff Parker nodded gravely.

"It wouldn't be the end of the world," said Philip Evans, "... if they had to go back and spend the night in Albuquerque. Diane and I have friends up there that could take them in for the night and put them back on a flight in the morning."

"For that matter," said Jeff Parker, "... if they should get diverted to El Paso, Nancy and I could drive down and pick both of them up. You two have your daughter here."

Nancy nodded in agreement. "You know," she said quietly to Diane, ".... normally I'm really reassured to have Max with Liz. Somehow - no matter what sort of predicament she gets herself in - he always manages to get her out - but this is different. Flying in to that would be something I don't think even Max would be able to do anything about."

"I wouldn't worry," Nancy, said Diane, "...you heard what the guy at the desk said. Nobody is going to fly into that - you'd have to be a total idiot."

Six miles away - most of that straight up - in Ghostrider 25:

"Aviate, navigate, communicate," said Rabbit to himself. It was a mantra that was drilled in to military pilots in undergraduate pilot training.
He'd gotten the lights in the cockpit turned up high enough that he could see the instruments - barely - even through the after-image of the lightning bolt that floated in his vision still. Rabbit wasn't surprised that he'd survived the lightning strike that hit the aircraft nose three feet in front of him. Military aircraft sometimes flew in rough weather, and while rare lightning strikes were certainly not unheard of.

One of the safest places to be in a lightning storm was inside of a vehicle. It was called the Faraday Cage effect. In general, people inside a metal cage - like the aircraft fuselage of this F-117A - were pretty much immune to the electrical effects of a lightning bolt that had the power to electrocute a thousand people if they were unshielded. But 'in general' had enough exceptions to make his current life very interesting.

But his first priority was to aviate - and he rolled the aircraft wings level and picked up the nose slightly to arrest a slight - well, a pretty impressive thousand foot per minute descent, actually. He bottomed out at Flight Level 240 before climbing back up to his assigned Flight Level 260. By that time he had the right and left generator circuit breakers pushed back in and was gratified to see the 'gen fail, right' and 'gen fail, left' lights go off in the annunciator panel. Although the battery in theory could power the avionics for over an hour, this was supposed to be the next to the last flight of this aircraft and he doubted that anyone would have sent it to storage with a brand new battery in it. Maintenance people just didn't do that.

Electricity was critical for the F-117A because electricity powered the stability augmentation system - or rather systems, as in plural. Unlike most aircraft, the F-117A had no inherent aerodynamic stability. As a matter of fact, it was just the opposite. The angular boxy shape of the aircraft was optimized only for the purpose of making sure that any radar waves that hit the aircraft were reflected in some other way besides back toward the sending radar. The ungainly looking aircraft simply didn't want to fly - at least not nose forward - and the multiple stability augmentation systems were required to continually make small corrections to keep the aircraft from swapping ends and flinging itself from the sky - with disastrous results to the unfortunate pilot that happened to be flying it. But the SAS - fortunately - had stayed on line when the electrical charge from the lightning bolt had somehow slipped inside the metal cage - most likely through the position lights - to overload the main battery bus and trip a dozen circuit breakers.

As the breakers were all gradually reset, it became apparent that the aircraft was in no imminent danger of flinging itself from the sky. He was being buffeted and the rain was intense and there were further lightning strikes occurring in the distance on both the right and the left - but at least the aircraft was flying.

Rabbit re-engaged the autopilot and brought his attention to his multifunction display - the better to navigate. That's when he got his next problem. The map display was frozen at the position he'd been when the lightning had struck, and overlying the whole map was a flashing 'GPS inop' indication.

Normally the global positioning system showed him exactly where he was with a small picture of an aircraft overlying the moving map display. A small antenna on the surface of the aircraft constantly monitored as many as a dozen satellites out in space to determine by triangulation precisely - very precisely indeed - just where the aircraft was. In a pinch it could get by with as few as three of these satellites - with some reduced accuracy - but generally it monitored at least ten and could tell the aircraft's position on Earth within literally a few feet and the altitude within perhaps fifty feet. But right now it wasn't working at all. The screen showed no satellites detected - not even one. What was worse, his TACAN and all of his other navigation gear seemed off line as well.

Rabbit looked at his flight plan and picked up the course from Roswell to Holloman - 242 degrees magnetic - and dialed it in to the autopilot. There was high terrain in that direction - Sierra Blanca at about 12,000 feet, but that was still 14,000 feet - almost two and a half miles - below his present altitude. For the time being, the navigation department was taken care of. Time to communicate.

"Center, this is Ghostrider 25, and I have a problem."

The silence became deafening.

"Center, this is Ghostrider 25...."

"Center, this is Ghostrider 25...."

"Center, this is Ghostrider 25...."

"PAN, PAN,PAN, any aircraft or station, this is Ghostrider 25...."

Nothing.

Rabbit reached for the transponder to squawk 7700 - the emergency code - and his hand stopped when he saw the indicator on the face of the transponder - it was not receiving any radar pulses.

With the rain beating against the windscreen the reality suddenly dawned on Rabbit. None of his communications or navigation gear were working. The lightning strike had to have gotten the antennas.

In fact, the antennas on the F-117A were unique in one respect. When it went in to stealth mode, they all retracted in to the fuselage. That was normal when they went to war. As soon as they started to get within range of the enemy radar, the antennas were retracted and the went in with no antennas sticking out to give a radar return to the enemy.

Rabbit hadn't retracted the antennas, but they had been outside the fuselage - outside the Faraday cage effect, and worse yet by sticking out above the fuselage they had acted like lightning rods and attracted the energy of the bolt. Obviously the antennas had been totally destroyed.

Rabbit took a deep breath. This wasn't, he told himself, all that bad. Even at his current reduced speed Holloman was less than a half hour away. There were established procedures for aircraft that had lost communications - a no-radio or NORDO aircraft in the vernacular of the military pilot. The procedures required him to maintain present altitude and to fly his flight plan course until he was on the instrument approach in to Holloman. Except with his TACAN and GPS out, he wouldn't really be able to tell when he was on that approach, so in this case the procedures weren't exactly all that helpful.

"Just another friggin opportunity to excel,...." Rabbit told himself. He looked at his paper map and flight plan. He knew where he was - sort of - and knew where he was going. He had no real idea what the winds were doing to him but in only a half hour of flight time they wouldn't be able to do an awful lot. The Tularosa Basin was ahead - it was 150 miles north-south and 60 miles east-west, and the military owned the airspace above it. There was no real way he could miss it, and unless these clouds went all the way down to the ground at Holloman he could descend into the middle of the basin and break out underneath - then land visually.

Rabbit had a plan - not the plan he would have wanted but a workable plan anyway. The air traffic control people couldn't see him with his transponder not working but the rules said they would continue to block other aircraft from his flightpath so there should be no problem with running in to someone else out here.

Rabbit couldn't help but smile at that. Surely there wasn't anybody ELSE stupid enough to blunder in to this storm....

Flight 526
50 nautical miles southeast of Albuquerque
leveling at Flight Level 240

No, Ned Harris had had no intention of staying back in the cabin very long. But nonetheless, that's what had happened.

He'd watched the teenage girl give him a surly look - he could almost hear her saying, 'Whatever,' under her breath - and taken the flimsy Mesa Air blanket back to the last usable seat on the left side of the aircraft - across from the sleeping boy. She'd grabbed a pillow along the way and with a glare at him and one of Valencia's bodyguards, she'd curled up facing the window. He watched her for a few minutes to be sure she wasn't watching him - and then either she went to sleep or she pretended to. He'd gone back to the bodyguards with his flight bag and then - after again checking the two Roswell teenagers who still appeared to be sleeping - he'd opened his flight bag and allowed each of the bodyguards to extract his pistol. That should have done it - that should have been all - but as he started on his way back to the cockpit he got an offer he just could not refuse.

As he'd gotten closer, Francisco Calderone had stood up.
"Ned, Mr. Valencia would like to talk to you," he said as he motioned him in to the seat he'd just vacated. Calderone had moved up one row to take the seat the teenage girl going to Roswell had so recently vacated.

"Senor Harris," said Valenci, holding out his hand.

"Mister Valenci," he had said, shaking it.

"Please call me Ramon. Francisco here speaks highly of you. I am in the process of building a small airline of my own - mostly Learjet 45s, i think, although as Chief Pilot you would have input as to that decision as well....."

So, ten minutes later, here he was sitting discussing the relative merits of Learjets and Cessna Citations. Salary would be the next topic. He wondered if he could talk 'El Jefe' into giving him a percentage of the take. A 401K certainly wouldn't be needed - none of the money was going to be taxed. Ned Harris smiled. He was certain beyond any doubt - he was going to be rich.


In the cockpit, Joe Hendershott was getting real nervous. As the aircraft had leveled off and started to accelerate to full speed, he'd peeked again in the radar scope. That big luminous mass was much bigger and much closer - parts of it only thirty miles away. At their current speed - 240 knots - they would be reaching the edges of it in less than eight minutes.

Fortunately there appeared to be a path through it that didn't look too bad. Their course took them through thirty miles of green - but avoided the more severe orange and red areas altogether. Then they'd be behind the system where the areas were dark black - meaning there was no storm there to reflect the radar back. He recalled in the simulator that the check pilot had said they would generally not fly in any weather heavier than light green, and it looked like on their present course there would be no problem. He thought briefly about seeing what was taking Captain Harris so long but he couldn't leave the flight deck and calling him on the PA would no doubt reinforce the senior pilots uncertainty about him.

No, thought Joe, he'd just keep flying - keep it in the green. It shouldn't be too bad. And once they got to those big black clear areas in back, they should have no problem at all.

It was unfortunate that Joe had never watched that DVD or read his manual about the radar. If he had they would have explained to him about attenuation.

The reality was that those black areas in back weren't clear at all - they were the leading edge of the heart of the storm where the rain was coming down so heavily that no radar return was possible.

Cherokee Range Control, White Sands Missile Range Base Camp
White Sands, New Mexico

The telephone rang and Airman First Class Richard Norman answered it. Airman First Class is not a real senior rank, but on the other hand it was usually more than adequate for a Sunday night shift at Cherokee Range Control.

Cherokee range control handled all the military airspace over the White Sands and Holloman range areas. During the week, flying was intensive there and a full complement of controllers kept very busy insuring aircraft separation. Holloman alone had three wings of aircraft, drone operations, an Army Helicopter range support unit and an Air Force Rescue detachment. WSMR had a huge operation with artillery ranges, air defense artillery ranges, rocket and missile ranges - even a rocket sled test track. During the week, it was as busy as any airspace in the world. On weekends, things were different. Oh, the Air National Guard would use the ranges on Saturdays, and even - occasionally Sunday mornings. But Sunday night? Nothing. Airman Norman had one flight scheduled in all night - a Nighthawk coming back from the East Coast that ought to be arriving almost any time now. After that he intended to play Tetris on his gameboy.

"Cherokee Control, Airman Norman," he answered smartly in his best military manner. It was the direct line from Albuquerque center and a simple "Cherokee' would have been more than adequate, but such things are sort of automatic to junior military personnel.

"Cherokee - this is Albuquerque Center - we have a problem with one of your incoming aircraft - Ghostrider 25. They dropped off the radar screen altogether right about Roswell. We've been trying to contact them but so far no reply. The pilot mentioned some convective activity in the area on his last transmission before he went off the scope. Right now we are assuming he is just NORDO, but - well, we really have no evidence he's even still airborne."

"I understand, sir, Ghostrider 25 went NORDO over Roswell and isn't currently on radar. I'll pass that information to the Holloman Command Post. Has anyone heard a beacon?"

A 'beacon' was an emergency locator transmitter that was designed to be activated by the impact of the aircraft with the terrain. When an aircraft crashed the beacon was supposed to activate and it did - usually - at least if the aircraft hit at the right angle and not too hard.

"No -we have a listening watch and we are still trying to contact Ghostrider 25, but it doesn't look real good right now. We are keeping his route and altitude blocked but.... well, all we can do I suppose is keep our fingers crossed. If you hear from him, please give us a call."

"I'll do that sir," promised the young airman. He put down the phone and picked up the red phone to the Holloman Command Post. The line was picked up almost immediately.

"Holloman Command Post, Captain Jacobs."

"Cherokee Control here, sir. We may have a problem..."

Flight Level 260 23 miles west of Roswell New Mexico
Aboard Ghostrider 25

You couldn't honestly say that the visibility was ever great out the front of an F-117A. Like everything else on the aircraft the cockpit windows were designed to reflect radar waves in some direction other than the radar they came from. The aircraft really didn't have a bubble canopy at all, and the rain sheeting off the side windows of the aircraft rendered visibility out of them almost non-existent. Under present conditions the small pane of glass that actually looked out forward was even worse. Nothing at all was visible through that window. Of course, that assumed there was anything out there to see, thought Rabbit. Not only shouldn't there be anything there – but even if there was it likely would have been difficult to see it.

The F-117 mission seldom involved formation flying, but Rabbit had done a lot of it in other aircraft – like the F-16. Visibility inside a cloud was sort of like visibility in fog. Sometimes you could see another aircraft in the cloud that was a mile or two away. If the 'fog' was dense you might lose sight of a guy ten feet off your wingtip and have to go 'lost wingman' to put separation between you and the other guy before you blindly collided. Rabbit had little doubt that the visibility here and now was more like the visibility in pea soup rather than fog. Even without the rain he doubted he could see a hundred feet. But if he could get out of the center of the storm – out on the periphery – it would likely be better.

On a hunch he tried using his forward looking infrared screen but of course it didn't help. Infrared works poorly in clouds and not at all in rain.
'Well,' said Rabbit to himself, 'if air traffic control is doing their job there really shouldn't be anything out there anyway.'



Flight 526
85 nautical miles southeast of Albuquerque
level at Flight Level 240

Joe Hendershott watched with growing apprehension as the aircraft marker in the radar screen approached the edge of the green glow of the storm. He should have been apprehensive. The company policy was that the Beechcraft 1900s could only penetrate weather when the ENTIRE system was green. The shades of yellow and red identified this as a severe weather system – even if the portion he was about to enter was not yet as severe as the storm back in those black areas that the rain induced attenuation of the small airborne radar concealed from him. Such storms generate strong areas of vertical shear along their periphery. Just as the aircraft hit the edge of the storm it hit just such an updraft.

The updraft was almost seventy miles an hour – and the aircraft was suddenly thrown upwards at nearly six thousand feet per minute – three times its normal best rate of climb. The autopilot – set to maintain 24,000 feet – slowly throttled the engines back to idle, but as the aircraft continued to rise did the only other thing it could which was push the nose over to try to get back down to the altitude it was set for.

The sudden force of the aircraft being pushed skyward instantly caught Ned's attention, and as he heard both engines throttle back he quickly excused himself from negotiating fringe benefits with his future employer. As the nose lowered and the noise in the cabin increased as the airspeed built – even while the altitude continued to rise, he fumbled for the handle to the cockpit door and hurriedly got in . He barely had the door closed before he was slipping in to the left seat and shouting angrily at the first officer.

“What in HELL have you gotten us in to?” Ned asked as he disconnected the autopilot and fought to level the aircraft.”

“There was just this area of green on the radar – I didn't want to bother you...”

Ned looked at the radar – there was red and yellow all over the place. They had to be in the mother of all vertical updrafts – they were at idle and already passing flight level 290. He fumbled to get his headset back on and punched the microphone transmit button.

“Center, this is Mesa Flight 526. We have blundered into a thunderstorm,” he said, glaring daggers at the copilot, “.... we are unable to maintain altitude in an updraft – now passing Flight Leven two niner zero.”

“Roger, Mesa 526. You are cleared block altitude for flight level 240 through 310. Keep us advised if you are unable to maintain that block.”

“Copy block 240 to 310 for Mesa 526,” replied Ned.

He kept his eyes on the instruments – stealing momentary glances at the radar screen and shaking his head.

“Lesson number one, kid, is that you don't get anywhere NEAR actual thunderstorms. Lesson number two is that if you are incredibly stupid enough to get caught in a thunderstorm and get in an updraft you do NOT push the nose over to try to keep your assigned altitude. The speed builds up rapidly above our maneuvering speed and when we hit the turbulence – and there's ALWAYS turbulence – the aircraft shakes itself apart.”

As if to prove the pilot's point, the aircraft entered a downdraft and went down three thousand feet per minute. Ned Harris lifted the nose passing through flight level 270 and the aircraft seemed to hold somewhere between flight level 250 and flight level 260 – and going back up to an airspeed of 240 knots as Ned fed the power back in to stabilize it.

The windscreen lit with flashes from distant lightning ahead of them, illuminating the rain falling heavily outside. Ned looked at the radar and shook his head. “That thunderstorm is all over Roswell. No way are we going there.” He keyed the mike to tell Albuquerque center that he wanted to return to Albuquerque, but the words never came out. He let go of the mike button and started to think as he turned the aircraft west toward the Tularosa basin.

Back in the passenger compartment he had two young kids who wanted to get to Roswell and two more on the ground there waiting to get picked up. That didn't matter in the least to Ned, one look at the radar told him they weren't going to Roswell tonight, but they also had eight people who wanted to go to El Paso. If he took those people back to Albuquerque a couple of things would happen. One would be that Mr. Valencia would not get home tonight. Another was that Mr. Valencia's bodyguards would be getting off the aircraft in the security area with four pistols that someone might see as they waited around for the flight to resume in the morning – pistols that he had carried into the secure area for them. That wasn't good. There was also the chance that someone would actually check the bags and find a fully automatic rifle – a rifle that he had personally brought on board. That wasn't good either. What's more – he and Fumblefingers Hendershott here had been flying since morning. The company would not let either of them fly the trip later tonight or in the early morning because they would be out of crew duty time - and whatever crew did fly them was unlikely to be unnderstanding about the firearms on the aircraft. That wasn't good either. Besides – Ned Harris had no doubt that the bouncing around they'd taken in back – and that they were continuing to take – had not favorably impressed his future employer.

Ned looked again at the radar – and once more at the moving map of the GPS. Then he punched the mike button again.

“Albuquerque Center, Mesa Flight 526 – I'm in a severe thunderstorm and I'd like to head west.”

“Roger Mesa 526 – what are your intentions?”

“It looks like the storm is mostly on the east side of the Sacramento Mountains. I'd like to head west – then go down the Tularosa basin to stay away from the center of the storm. Once we are clear of it I intend to divert to the south – to El Paso.”

“That's approved, Mesa 526. Maintain flight level 250, turn right to 270 degrees. Be advised we have one other aircraft that may be out there – we lost him from our radar screens a few minutes ago over Roswell. If he's still aloft he's NORDO. Maintain your current altitude until cleared lower by Cherokee Range control on 123 decimal six”

Ned looked at the radar screen and figured out where Roswell should be on the screen. It was nothing but bright red. If the aircraft had disappeared from radar in THAT mess it was without doubt crashed somewhere. It certainly wasn't anything he was going to worry about. He turned the plane toward the west and started battling the turbulence and rain to get to the Tularosa Basin and a clear path to El Paso for his new employer.

Young teenagers have sleep habits that to adults seem scarcely human - even those teenagers who aren't alien-human hybrids. Anyone doubting that should attend a junior high school slumber party. Young teens can get by for two days on less than three hours sleep with no apparent decrease in energy or enthusiasm – only to suddenly then crash for sixteen hours straight.

In the back of the aircraft, the two teenagers were sleeping soundly and peacefully. Fatigue no doubt played the major part. They had flown in Friday night and met new roommates who they had spent most off the night talking to, spent Saturday at a science fair, Saturday night at a dance, and then – as the saying goes – things had really gotten weird. One had been drugged, beaten, forced to drink a fifth of tequila, and spent the better part of the night awake – if groggy and hung over – getting her stomach pumped and getting forensic exams and pictures taken of various parts of her anatomy. At that she probably was the better rested of the two.

The young man had proceeded from the dance only momentarily before returning to find her missing and racing from door to door searching for her repeatedly over four floors before finally finding her – then intoxicating himself resuscitating her before wrestling with a cop, having every muscle in his body convulsed with 600,000 volts – twice – escaping from a jail by crawling through the ductwork, hiking back to the dorm where he got in a fight, being stunned again – three times – with 600,000 volts again convulsing every muscle in his body, and finally getting pulled in to the ploice station for photos, prints, and catching the aircraft only at a dead run.

It was probably fair to say that both of them were sleeping not just the sleep of the innocent, but the sleep of the near-terminally fatigued. But at that they were doing better than everyone else in the cabin.

The rest of the cabin reeked with the smell of fear – not unreasonably. The sky was filled with the bright flashes of lightning – many close enough to actually be heard within the cabin over the roar of the engines and the sound of the rain beating against the fuselage. Heard also within the cabin were occasional whimpers from the eight people in the forward part of the cabin. One woman had apparently retrieved a long-forgotten rosary from her purse and was busy fingering it - mouthing sacraments she had not verbalized since childhood. The other woman seemed anxious to borrow it as soon as she was finished. Even the four large brutes that sat at the back of the small group seemed to have remembered a few prayers from their youth. The furthest one back on the left cast a somewhat disbelieving look back at the sleeping couple – but if he was irritated at their sedate slumber he still said nothing. He had already added the obscene comment he had made to the young girl to a rather long list of sins that he was silently swearing to his Creator that he would tell a priest in a formal Confession at the very first possible opportunity – if that Creator would simply would simply insure that this aircraft manage to somehow deliver him safely to the ground so that his shaking knees could get him to a church.

In fact, six sinners – most with some pretty impressive sins – were silently vowing to change their ways entirely if the good Lord would just get them safely to the ground. How many would keep such promises once no longer in danger was likely another story. The other two in the forward part of the cabin seemed to have a different interest. Oh, Calderone and Valencia were also scared and certainly sinners – no less so than the other six – but their topic of discussion was a re-evaluation of whether they really wanted as a chief pilot, someone who could get them into this mess.

In the front cockpit, things were going a little better.
Ned looked at the moving map of the GPS and smiled. They had past the highest point of the Sacramento mountains and the ground now descended toward the Tularosa Basin. The high country was behind them and that would block out the worst of the storm. They were still getting a few bumps but the issue of surviving the thunderstorm was not in doubt. He had tuned in the Holloman ATIS which was indicating a ceiling of 12,000 feet and five miles visibility in light rain. All he really needed to do now was to turn south and head for El Paso – land the aircraft – and then explain at great lengths to Mr. Valencia that it was the company chief pilot and his inexperienced copilot that had screwed up, and how nice it would be to be the Chief Pilot himself so he wouldn't have to put up with such incompetents. He hoped it would work.

“Cherokee Control, Mesa Flight 526 – requesting direct to El Paso.”

“Mesa Flight 526,” replied Airman First Class Norman, “I'm unable to give you direct El Paso at this time – I have a NORDO instrument flight and I need to keep the high approach corridors open. I need you to continue west for another 40 miles and then I can turn you south toward El Paso.”

Ned shook his head angrily. The kid sounded like he was fourteen. What did he know? If that plane was the one they'd lost over Roswell the damn thing was almost certainly wreckage on the ground on the east side of the Sacramentos and even if it wasn't – what were the odds? The Cherokee range airspace encompassed almost the entirety of the Tularosa basin -6500 square miles. Moreover, the airspace went from the ground to 35,000 feet in most of the Air Force and Army artillery ranges, and from ground to infinity in the White Sands Missile Range itself. That was over 40,000 CUBIC MILES that tonight would contain – at most – two aircraft. The odds of one of those aircraft hitting the other at all were spectacularly small, even if the other aircraft wasn't burning in some shallow crater in eastern New Mexico. No, he was not going to further irritate his new employer by stupid roundabout routes that would stretch out the time it would take him to get home. There was a way to handle this.

“Cherokee, Mesa Flight 526 is VMC between layers. We'd like to cancel IFR and get VFR flight following direct to El Paso.”

Hendershott looked at Harris but didn't say anything. Even he knew better than this. They were over 26,000 feet high and still in clouds – clouds that went down another 9,000 feet. Ned had just lied to the controller – told him that they were in visual meteorological conditions – that they could actually see where they were going – and requested that the range control cancel their instrument clearance which would allow them to get to El Paso directly – and much quicker. It was, of course, completely illegal – but no one would ever be able to prove they'd done anything illegal. The range controller would still watch them on radar – tell them if he saw any aircraft getting close – and warn them in plenty of time for them to change altitude or heading to miss it. Harris' lie wouldn't keep the controller from continuing to watch on his radar and report any nearby traffic. It just took the responsibility – and the authority – for keeping separation from other aircraft away from the controller and put it in the hands of the pilots in Flight 526. Perhaps Hendershott had some qualms, but if so he didn't voice them. He'd fouled up enough on this flight – who knew what Harris was going to tell the Chief Pilot about him. But by going along with this – by going along with this Ned Harris would owe him one. How likely was it that Harris would tell the Chief Pilot of all of his foul-ups if he had this to retaliate with?

Hendershott looked in Harris' eyes and nodded his head. The agreement was unspoken but understood. If Joe kept his mouth shut about this, Ned wouldn't say anything about the radar problems to the Chief Pilot. They'd get back to Phoenix late tonight and Joe Hendershott promised himself he'd review that DVD – learn everything there was to know about that damned airborne radar – before he put his head down and went to sleep.

Airman First Class Norman looked at his scope. He didn't like this – they were going to cut right across two of the five approaches that the NORDO Ghostrider 25 might be taking – if Ghostrider 25 was still airborne. Of course, between layers it would be pitch black and with the strobe and position lights on either aircraft they'd stand out like a Christmas tree so the 'see-and-avoid' of visual flight rules would most likely be perfectly adequate. Besides, once Mesa Flight 526 had canceled IFR, he really had no justification to deny him the clearance.

“Mesa Flight 526 – I copy you are canceling IFR. Squawk 1200 and you are cleared to proceed direct to El Paso through the Cherokee airspace. The Holloman altimeter is two nine niner seven.”


Ghostrider 25
Thirty-five miles south-southeast of Mesa Flight 526 at Flight Level 260

Rabbit looked at the watch and looked at the compass. His course was 270 – due west – and he estimated that he'd pass the crest of the Sacramento range in 20 nautical miles – only five minutes at his current 240 knots. After that he could begin his letdown. He'd have the width of the range – almost sixty miles – to drop down through these clouds and find out if he could get underneath them. Field elevation at Holloman was about 4000 feet above sea level. He figured he'd go down as close as 6000 feet in the range area in the middle of the basin. If he broke out underneath that would be great – he'd go VFR underneath on the forward looking infrared and find Holloman and land. If he didn't he wasn't going to risk flying toward Alamogordo. It wasn't a huge town, but it was the biggest one around. He'd just eject up in the north end of the range where it was damn near uninhabited.

It wasn't the best plan, Rabbit realized, but it was a plan. At least he now had most of the storm behind him. “Come on old girl,” he said patting the canopy rail of the aircraft affectionately. “...just hang in there another fifteen or twenty minutes and we can both be home.”


The two aircraft converged – Mesa Air Flight 526 flying almost due south and Ghostrider 25 flying almost due west - both doing about 240 knots. That gave them a closure rate of almost 350 knots – nearly six nautical miles a minute. Ned Harris was right – the odds of the two aircraft being in the same place at the same altitude at the same time were infinitesimally small – but apparently it was just that sort of night.

The visibility in the cloud was about a quarter mile. Ned Harris never had a chance to see the black aircraft coming from his left at all since its lights had been fused by the lightning bolt. It wouldn't have mattered anyway – he was looking down at the GPS moving map in any event.

Rabbit was looking out – scanning – and he did see the twin engine aircraft. But the aircraft were converging at six miles a minute – over 500 feet per second – which gave Rabbit less than three seconds to see the aircraft – react to it – and change the flightpath of his aircraft enough to miss.

That was too much to ask of any human, but even so he almost pulled it off. With the cat-quick reflexes that he had honed in five years as a fighter pilot he put the aircraft into a slice – a radical maneuver where he rolled the aircraft past the vertical to be able to pull back and behind the aircraft using 'God's G' to augment the seven g turn the aircraft was capable of. That maneuver was the only chance for a miss and had the aircraft been an F-22 – or even an F-16 that could have pulled 9 g's it would have been successful. But the F-117A was an attack plane – not a true fighter- and it could neither pull nor sustain the g's of these other aircraft. Even so – it was very close.

Rabbit saw the aircraft lights of the twin turbine aircraft and reacted instinctively to put his aircraft in a right slice – knowing even as he did so that it was already too late. He was in fact surprised that he actually got the nose of the F-117 down enough to pass under the fuselage of the small airliner and just for a few milliseconds thought that he might miss altogether. The loud noise as his left wing impacted the other aircraft quickly disabused him of that notion and he fought to stabilize the aircraft as the annunciator panel lit up with warning lights and Bitching Betty started to squawk.

“Warning – low utility hydraulic pressure.”

“Warning – low utility hydraulic pressure.”

“Warning – utility hydraulic system failure.”

The aircraft wallowed like an injured whale and threatened to fall from the sky as Rabbit fought for control. In the darkness he couldn't see the left wing, but the way the aircraft was flying it was clear the left wing had taken some real damage. Of course, Rabbit had a few things going for him. The gross weight of the F-117 was over 25 tons – three times that of the small airliner – and military aircraft are built rugged. Moreover they are designed to be damage tolerant – the stability augmentation system detected the abnormalities caused by damage and moved the control surfaces automatically to offset – to the extent possible – the effects of any damage. In fact military aircraft were known to have landed safely after losing complete wings.

Rabbit lowered the nose and the aircraft slid down into the Tularosa Basin. At 16,000 feet he descended below the base of the clouds and saw the full moon just above the Oscura range on the west edge of the basin where the storm had not yet reached. Rabbit looked out at the left wing – there was a good six feet missing.

He did a controllability check and found that the aircraft tended to roll to the left anytime he got below one hundred-eighty knots because of the asymmetric lift so he set up for a long fast straight-in approach. He lowered the gear with the emergency handle because of the utility hydraulic failure - then took an approach end barrier – the hook at the rear of the jet catching the cable at the beginning of the runway much like a Navy carrier aircraft. The cable reeled out against the resistance of a huge brake and the F-117 stopped four hundred feet down the runway. The firetruck and ambulance were soon there – Rabbit talked for an hour to the wing safety people and had two hours of paperwork to fill out – it was almost midnight before he finally got to bed. But when he finally did, he'd sleep next to his wife and hold her and reassure her. He'd miss his F-22 class date but he'd at least be home to see his child born. He'd eventually go to a later class.

The F-117 would never fly again. Although repairable, it would go to Tonopah Test Range disassembled in a cargo aircraft to be entombed with all of its brethren – obsolete but still too capable to allow the technology to be sold.

The Beechcraft was not nearly so lucky.