A Twist in Time (23 page)

She stayed with her eyes closed and her body still as she tried to puzzle through what happened.  She was shopping for a wedding dress.  The small boutique was in a crowded strip mall and she had to park in back.  As she got into her car, someone grabbed her from the back seat and that’s all she remembered.  Obviously, someone captured her for some reason.  Just as obviously, she had to do something about it.

As part of her Astronaut training Rae opted for the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course in the rugged landscape of Brunswick Maine.  She took the Navy course instead of the more common Air Force Survival School because Navy SERE has the reputation of being a tougher all around experience. Since, in theory, a NASA Astronaut could land anywhere on the Earth, she wanted the best survival training she could get. Now, in this position she clicked into a mode that was icily analytical on the outside and extremely frustrated on the inside.   

She didn’t see any way she could get her bound hands on a door latch in order to open the door and roll out of the car.  She involuntarily flexed her right foot at the thought of the fall and her foot found her small flight bag, not her helmet bag, on the seat in its normal place.  She knew there was a Leatherman multipurpose tool in there.  The Leatherman had two good knife blades in addition to everything else and she could cut off the plastic cuffs and fight her way out of the vehicle. The road they were on wasn’t very smooth and they were going fast, so maybe she could use her legs to move the bag toward her hands without attracting attention from the front seat. 

Moving her feet slowly, literally a centimeter at a time, she got the bag to her hands in back of her body. As she felt around, she was surprised to find the bag was unzipped. They had apparently searched the bag. There was no Leatherman, but she did find her SPOT personal tracker.  The SPOT tracker is a handheld commercial device used by many pilots because, when activated, it sends out regular position reports to anyone on an email list as well as being able to call for emergency assistance.  It’s both a location-reporting device and an emergency position indicating reporting beacon or EPIRB.

The SPOT device has a row of buttons along the bottom and she struggled to remember their order as she held it behind her back.  You’re supposed to first turn it on so the GPS can get a fix and then tell it to send one of three pre-coded messages.  As she remembered, it could take several minutes to get a GPS lock.  She hit what she was sure was the ON button and started counting seconds.  When she reached 180, she couldn’t wait any longer.  She stabbed what she hoped was the “Send Help” button and positioned the SPOT as high as she could on the back of the seat.  She hoped it could see the sky well enough to get a GPS fix and to transmit its message through the SPOT satellite to her custom email list.  For the “Send Help” response, that list included an emergency email address monitored by the people at the Project’s operations console.   

__________

Craig Pulliam, now officially a civilian senior systems analyst for Interspace Corporation, was 12 miles south east of the Boulder City Airport practicing slow flight with a student pilot at 2500 feet above ground level.  The active VHF radio in the Cessna 182 was set to 122.7 MHz, the local Unicom frequency for the Boulder Airport.  Earlier, they had dropped Lieutenant Colonel Jose Valenzuela at Nellis Air Force Base where he was taking his last flight in his F-5.  Craig was surprised to hear a radio call directed to his aircraft since he hadn’t announced their location. “Cessna three alpha mike, come up one two three four five.”

Without saying anything on 122.7, Craig dialed the right hand radio panel to 123.45 MHz and punched it in as the active radio.  “Three alpha mike,” was all he said on that frequency.

“Craig, it’s Ted. I’m on a hand-held radio in the parking lot, Copy?”

On the Cessna’s intercom, Craig told his student, “I have the controls.” As he increased the engine power, raised the flaps, and lowered the nose, Craig also made a gentle left turn that headed the plane back toward what he still thought of as the “Alternate Facility.” 

“Loud and clear and headed your way,” he replied. 

 “Good idea. Land on three three and pick me up on the intersection of three three and two seven.”  Ted jumped in his Escalade Hybrid and drove too fast to the nearby Boulder City airport.  He cut around the east end of the airport parking lot and picked up a maintenance road that took him to the intersection of the two runways.  At almost exactly the same time Craig and his student landed and quickly stopped the plane right where runway 33 intersected runway 27. The student, another ex-warrant officer, hopped out of the right side of the plane.  As Ted passed him he pointed to the SUV and said, “It’s running.  Get it out of here.” 

Ted threw a flight bag on the back seat, climbed in and as he latched the Cessna’s door, without a seatbelt or headset in place he shouted, “Go! Takeoff straight ahead.”  Pulliam had about a third of the runway behind him, so he stood on the brakes as he pushed in the throttle, cranked in some flaps, and let the engine wind up. When the engine was up to speed he released the brakes and they were off the ground with a thousand feet of runway remaining. 

“Rae has been kidnapped,” Ted said tersely. Her SPOT EPIRB is sending her location intermittently.  We know she’s in a vehicle, probably her own red Tahoe, doing about sixty miles an hour on road that runs along the base of the mountains near highway ninety-three.  I don’t think our voice cell phones will work in the air, but the text function probably will because it’s data.  The duty controller is sending me minute-by-minute updates on her position.  Head about one zero zero for now.”  Ted stopped talking and started going through the options in the plane’s GPS.  Craig Pulliam didn’t say a word, but at five hundred feet over the runway he leveled the nose and racked the airplane in a steep right turn to the southeast while the engine remained roaring at takeoff power. 

When he had steering guidance from the GPS, Craig looked at the map display and said, “She’s in Arizona.  That’s kidnapping across state lines.  Somebody is pretty stupid.  Have the guys called the cops and FBI?”

“No. That was my decision. Since we have her location reports, I hope we can handle it without raising a lot of attention.  They went after Fred Landry and wanted him alive, so I’m sure they haven’t hurt Rae.”  Craig said nothing, but trimmed the airplane for a little more speed.

They picked up the highway and the side road about fourteen minutes later.  Craig kept them about 500 feet over the road.  “I’ve got a red SUV.” Ted said.  “Lower and slower!”

Craig gritted his teeth, slowed to about 65 knots, and pressed the trim button on the stick.  He setup a descent that would practically land them on top of the red vehicle.  Ted checked his cell phone for a text message and checked the airplane’s GPS. “That’s got to be it.  The SPOT message is just a minute old and the coordinates are right here.”

Craig came up on the vehicle so it sat on Ted’s side of the airplane.  They were practically flying in formation with the car as the Cessna was just a hundred feet off the roadway. All the driver had to do to get rid of them was to slow down because Craig couldn’t hover.  Instead the driver went faster.  That actually made it easier for Craig to keep in formation. 

Ted pointed and waved at the two men in the front seat to stop.  Then, for a few seconds, Rae raised her head in the back seat.  Her mouth was covered with tape and she was off balance.  She was obviously straining to sit up. She looked right at him, nodded, and then ducked back down. 

An instant later, the Tahoe slowed in a cloud of dust and turned left onto a even more narrow road leading up to the ridge of mountains.  Craig established a climb, raised the flaps, and started to circle a few hundred feet over the road.

Ted reached into the backseat for the flight bag.  He pulled out his Springfield Armory 1911 and estimated his ability to put some .45 caliber rounds into the tires or the engine.  The air was rough and he thought he’d either be wasting ammunition he might need later or he might actually put one into the passenger compartment and endanger Rae. “Is Jose airborne do you think?”

Craig glanced at his watch and thought for a second.  Quickly looking back at the nearby mountain peaks as he replied, “Yeah, and he probably hasn’t been airborne too long. This was a maintenance hop and he had a lot of paperwork before the flight. He told me he was going to stretch every drop of fuel and enjoy it.”   

Ted said, “He’d probably go VFR outside the Nellis range. Let’s see what we can do on the radio.  Give me another thousand feet or so.”  He turned to the radio panel.  Because the Cessna was an Aeroclub aircraft from Nellis, it had an ultra high frequency or UHF radio as well as the standard general aviation VHF radio.  Air Force fighters like the F-5 generally relied on UHF.  The UHF radio in the Cessna was tuned to the Nellis departure control frequency.  Ted hoped that was the same frequency Jose’s radio was still on in his F-5.  Craig climbed to improve the radio coverage.  

Ted selected the UHF radio as primary, hit the push to talk, and said, “Air Force two six seven oh one, come up quad three. Air Force two six seven oh one, change and answer quad three.”  As he spoke, Ted turned a knob so the frequency 333.3 MHz came up on the dial of the alternate UHF radio. Quad three is an Air Force-wide air-to-air frequency.  He pushed the button to make the air-to-air frequency active.

A moment later, Ted heard, “Seven oh one on quad three.”   He quickly replied, “Seven oh one this is Project One, what’s your position and fuel state?”

Jose answered quickly, “Thirty east of Nellis and I’ve got almost a full bag.”

Ted said, “Vector one eight zero. Set speed liner.”   Those instructions told Jose to head due south at a cruising speed that had minimum fuel consumption.  “Tell me when you’re ready to input GPS coordinates.”  Jose would have to bring up a specific page on the GPS screen to enter the coordinates.  That wasn’t easy in a cramped fighter cockpit. About forty five seconds later, Jose said, “Ready to input.”

They were still circling the red Tahoe as it climbed the ridge, so Ted simply read off their present position from the Cessna’s GPS.  Jose read the numbers back and then said, “Twenty miles, five minutes.”

Ted let off on the military jargon; “We’re circling at about a thousand feet AGL over Rae’s red SUV.  There’s some Tangos driving it and they’ve got her in the back seat.  I want you to try to blow them off the road and stop them. It’s not a good deal, but you’re the best we’ve got.”

________

Jose was enjoying simply flying.  He had the radio volume turned low it was Ted’s voice more than his own call sign that caught his attention.  As he changed radio frequencies, he was puzzled. He had been heading almost due north, when Ted told him to head south without thinking he retarded the throttle, raised the nose of the F-5, and executed a wingover.  The wingover maneuver is the fastest way to change direction as long as someone isn’t shooting at you because the airplane literally hangs and pivots on a wing.  You get going the other way very efficiently, but you make a great target while you do it.

As he reached a southerly heading, he punched the GPS button to bring up the correct entry page.  Because of his Red Flag flying experience, he had practice setting a destination point into the GPS using latitude and longitude, but still, the little keyboard on the device and the lack of a real number pad didn’t make it easy.  

After Jose gave Ted the distance and range, Ted’s next words first puzzled him and then made his blood run cold. “
Tangos?”
he thought. He knew the phrase from his time in Iraq, but
Tangos had Rae? 
His hand went to the throttle with the intent to bend it to the firewall, but he stopped. Fuel equals flight time and time on station might be more important than the minute or two he would save getting there and the problems of slowing down when he arrived. Ted had said to set speed “liner”, not “buster”, so fuel was important.  He nudged the throttle and nosed down into a fast descending cruise.  He also reached over and turned off his transponder.  No sense in inviting some air traffic controller to ask what he was doing. 

Tangos had Rae…what the hell?  Let’s kill ‘em!
It wasn’t the first time Jose felt frustrated by having a fighter with inert guns, but it was the most bitter.

_______

There was a long pause while Jose absorbed Ted’s information.  “We won’t be able to use other means?” Jose asked. Even over the radio his voice sounded strange.   Ted knew Jose was asking if they couldn’t plant a hot bead in the heads of the bad guys, the “Tangos”.