The Four Faces Of Rath

Culpepper's Last Flight

Chapter 66 (Adapted from TNTDD Ch 32)

LXVI

"Climb out of the plane," Agent Culpepper yelled up to the pilot of the F-14 preparing to taxi to the runway. The pilot pulled back his canopy and removed his helmet, then he powered down his jet.

"What's going on?"

"I need your plane," Culpepper said. "I've been ordered to use this one for a special mission."

"I wasn't told anything," the pilot said.

"This is very hush-hush, Lieutenant. I expect you to keep it that way. You guys haven't been able to dent that UFO with your missiles. General Haggerty wants me to try something else."

"It won't do any good," the pilot said, shaking his head. "We've fired thousands of rounds and at least twenty missiles at that thing. It all just disappear into thin air. That ship's impervious. It doesn't even know we're attacking it. It would take a nuke to bring it down."

"That's what I told the general," Culpepper said.

"A nuke?"

"The general wouldn't give me one. I had to come up with something just as good. Lieutenant, did you ever watch Star Wars… you know, the original movie?"

"Yeah… I saw it several times. I've got all the episodes on DVD."

"Remember the Death Star?"

"Yeah."

"Remember how they destroyed it?"

"Yeah. Luke shot a missile into a small vent that went to the reactor in the core."

"Right. And when the Death Star was being rebuilt in the third movie, they destroyed that one by flying one of those X-Wings right into the inside of the thing, firing into the reactor, and flying back out before it all blew up."

"Yeah. I remember that," the pilot said.

"Well, Lieutenant, there's been an AWAC up there taking recon photos of that ship and the area and transmitting them back. I assume General Hawkins or General Haggerty sent it up. Look at these recon photos that have been coming in. Do you see anything?"

"I see one monster UFO," the pilot said.

"Do you see this vent… right here?" Culpepper pointed to a part of the picture.

"You're going to fire a missile into that?" The pilot looked unconvinced.

"It's a bigger opening than it looks like in the photo, Lieutenant. That opening is big enough to fly a fighter jet into… and back out again."

The pilot shook his head. "Uh uh… It may be big enough to fly into, but where are you going to turn around? You don't even know what's in there?"

"The reactor's in there, Lieutenant. Recon has confirmed it. It's emitting some kind of ions from the vent that can only come from a reactor. It's not nuclear, but it should blow up with one helluva a bang just the same. There's a similar vent on the other side of the ship. That's a distance of three miles… one and a half in… fire my missiles… then one and a half out the other side. This F-14 can cover that distance in under 30 seconds. It should be enough time for me to get out before the whole thing goes up."

"You're crazy," the pilot said, shaking his head. "Did General Hawkins approve this?"

"General Haggerty ordered it," Culpepper lied.

The pilot breathed a deep breath and let it out slowly again. "Well, I guess he knows what he's doing… but I wouldn't want to fly into that thing and shoot a missile into its reactor… whatever it is… then try to get back out again."

"Nobody's asking you to, Lieutenant. I flew one of these planes for several years before I became part of the Unit. I'm taking this ride."

"I'm glad it's you and not me," the pilot said honestly, stepping out of the way, as Culpepper climbed into the pilot's seat and powered the F-14 up again. Moments later, Culpepper taxied the F-14 to the end of the runway… then the plane's engines roared, as the jet rushed down the runway and lifted into the air, banking into the sun and heading off in the direction of the Reservation and Roswell.

The pilot watched his plane disappear then walked into the airmen's barracks and set his helmet down on a table.

"I thought you were flying," a voice behind him said.

The pilot turned around, and a young airman handed him a cup of coffee.

"Thanks. Yeah, I was, but apparently the General had other ideas."

"Ah, yes! He can be like that."

"Weren't you on the first recon mission… the one that just got back," the lieutenant asked the young airman.

"Yep… We got a great bird's eye view of that thing. It's huge! I can only wonder how they make it just sit up there like that."

The lieutenant nodded. "So the primary propulsion it uses isn't nuclear, huh?"

The airman raised his eyebrows a notch and shook his head. "How'd you know that?"

"Somebody told me. What kind of reactor does it use?"

The airman breathed in deeply then exhaled softly. "Anti-matter."

The lieutenant's face turned ashy white, and he appeared to reel. He ran one hand through his hair nervously then laid it on the back of the chair beside him. The young airman noticed that the knuckles of the lieutenant's hand were turning white as he held onto the back of the chair; and realizing that something was very, very wrong, he turned several shades lighter himself… "What? What's the matter?"

"Barker's going to fire a missile into an anti-matter reactor in that UFO up there… with my plane," Strickland said, trying to sound calmer than he actually was. "If he does… it'll be the end of… maybe the world… but at least this hemisphere. Do you know what even a small amount of destabilized anti-matter could do?"

The airman shook his head. "Maybe they have a secure containment field or something around their reactor."

"Maybe," the lieutenant agreed, "but I can't take that chance… the WORLD can't take that chance. I've got to get to a radio."

Lieutenant Strickland ran from the airmen's barracks and jumped into a small truck that was sitting in front of the barracks with the keys still in it, then he drove across the airfield to the control tower. As fast as he could, he ran up the stairs and knocked desperately on the door. He heard the electronic latch unlock, and one of the controllers opened the door.

"Lieutenant?"

"I need to come in."

The controller moved aside to let Lieutenant Strickland enter then immediately turned his attention back to the UFO on the horizon. It was clearly visible in the distance from the tower, and both of the controllers were watching it intently with something akin to deep awe, even though it sat quite a few miles away from the airfield or the base itself, over the Mesaliko Reservation and the town of Roswell.

"I don't have time to explain," Strickland said, grabbing for the microphone. He needn't have bothered. The two controllers weren't paying any attention to anything that he was doing. Strickland pressed the button to speak…

"Barker! Barker, come in!"

There was no answer. Strickland called again, but Barker was apparently not answering his radio. He probably had it turned off. That would be something Barker would do. That way if he was ordered back to base he could say that he never heard the order and blame Strickland with leaving his radio turned off.

"Dammit, Barker, come in!" Strickland yelled over the radio one more time. For a moment, he seemed to despair… but then he turned to the controllers…

"Has anyone tried to contact that ship up there?"

"What for," the younger of the two controllers asked, with a tone of amusement in his voice. "We don't have anyone on the base who speaks Martian."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe they might understand US," Lieutenant Strickland asked, turning the frequency dial to scan for any possible signal source.

"What would we say to them," the second controller asked.

"You might try, 'hello!'" Strickland said with a tone of obvious irritation in his own voice.

Strickland picked up the mike and pressed the button again…

"This is… uh… this is Lieutenant David Strickland… If anyone can hear me on that ship… this is important. Come back… I mean, uh… reply!"

Strickland turned the dial several times, each time repeating his message again, then a few moments later, he got an unexpected surprise…

"Go ahead, Lieutenant Strickland. We're listening."

Both controllers looked at each other, their eyes wide.

Strickland pressed the button on the mike again… "Uh… okay, we, uh… we have… well, YOU have… WE ALL, I guess, have an emergency situation here. One of our agents is going to fly a fighter jet into a large vent on your ship. He intends to fire a missile into the reactor as he flies through the core. Do you understand me?"

There was silence on the radio. For a moment, Lieutenant Strickland's heart sank into his stomach. Maybe they hadn't understood anything he had said. What had made him think that they would understand him anyway? They probably didn't even know what a jet was… or a missile… at least not by those names. And Barker… or Culpepper, as he preferred to call himself, would be getting there very soon… if he wasn't there already.

"Lieutenant," a voice came back over the air finally, "I have someone here who is qualified to discuss the risks with you."

"I am Varec," a different voice said, with an accent that the lieutenant couldn't place. The other voice had sounded… well, now that he thought about it, almost American… perhaps even New Mexican. This new one, though, was different somehow… maybe Canadian. No. Not Canadian… Definitely not Canadian…

"Mister Varec," Lieutenant Strickland said, shaking himself out of his thoughts and back to the matters at hand, "your ship and our world are in danger. If Agent Barker flies into your ship's vent and fires a missile into your anti-matter reactor… and manages to blow it up… it could destroy not only your ship but potentially half of our world."

"You are well-informed," the voice from the ship above said.

"And desperate," Strickland said sternly. "There's no time. Barker may be there already."

"Wouldn't the outflow of air push anything back out of the vent," Strickland heard the first voice ask the one named Varec.

"A bird, yes, Zan… maybe even a small plane," Varec replied… "but probably not a slip-stream… what you call a 'jet.' It has enough power and speed to fly into our vent, but I do not think that it could fly through the containment area in the core."

"I hope you're right," the first voice said… "because I think I see it coming now."

Max, Michael, Varec, Liz, Alex, Isabel, Maria, and the others who were currently on the bridge crowded nearer to the huge front window of the ship to catch a glimpse of the fast approaching fighter jet.

"Strickland," Varec said, "Warn your pilot not to enter the core! He will not survive."

In the pilot's seat of the approaching F-14 fighter jet, Barker, alias Agent Culpepper, sat transfixed, gazing at the huge mothership ahead of him with a single-minded, blind fanaticism and a trace of a smile on his face. He never really entertained the thought that anything could go wrong with his plan. Of course, somewhere deep inside his mind, he knew that it could… but there was a certain arrogant self-assuredness about Culpepper that wouldn't allow him to seriously consider failure. He was sure of himself. He was sure of his abilities. He was sure of his plan.

Barker aligned the F-14 Tomcat with the huge spaceship's oval-shaped starboard vent and adjusted his speed and flaps slightly, rotating the plane's adjustable wings out just a bit for stability as he slowed the jet's forward speed to make any final course adjustments. The plane wobbled ever so slightly as it continued to speed toward the opening. Seeing himself right on course, Barker increased the throttle to full and turned on the afterburners.

Strickland pressed the button on his mike to warn Culpepper away, but it was already too late. At that moment, Barker's fully-armed F-14 Tomcat flew straight into the starboard vent at full throttle and with afterburners blazing. Max looked at Varec then at Michael. Both of them stood there silently… waiting.

It was exactly as Barker had imagined it inside the huge oval-shaped vent… The passage was easily sixty feet high… probably a bit more… and it was wider than four F-14 Tomcats placed wing to wing, not enough room to turn a jet around in but certainly enough for any crack pilot like himself to fly through. Barker's F-14 Tomcat, by comparison, was sixteen feet high and had a wingspan of 64 feet, 1.5 inches "spread," which is at their maximum span. The wings can be drawn back into the "swept" position, which reduces their span to only 38 feet, 2.5 inches, or "overswept" position, which reduces them almost another five feet, to 33 feet, 3.5 inches.

As Barker flew into the huge vent, he did notice a significant amount of air resistance. His plane's airspeed dropped by about one fourth as it encountered the outflow of air coming from the core. It felt a bit like driving a car into a strong headwind. But Barker was not concerned. At full speed or three quarters speed, his success, he was absolutely positive, was assured. The plane's afterburners would push him through the heavy outflow of air on the way in and onward to the core. There, he would fire his missiles… then the rushing outflow of air on the other side of the ship would actually provide him with a tailwind, helping him to get out before the ship exploded, as he exited with the airflow. It was a sweet plan.

What Barker, alias Culpepper, did not know was that the reactor was actually well protected and totally impervious to any of his missiles. But more important than that, to Culpepper, would have been the knowledge that the reactor was cooled by forced air flowing around the inside of the entire core at a speed greater than that of any hurricane ever known on earth. In a sense, this was a ship that actually breathed. When they were not in space, air was sucked in literally through every centimeter of the skin of the ship and diverted into the core where it flowed around the reactor many times before being vented out through the huge vents. The system was very efficient… but incredibly violent, wind-wise, within the core itself. In the vacuum of space, the air was unnecessary to protect the reactor.

As Culpepper flew Strickland's F-14 Tomcat ever deeper into the enormous passageway inside the vent, heading toward the core of the mothership, Max and the others braced themselves for… they weren't quite sure what. But Varec knew. It was he, after all, who had designed the ship… and he had helped to build it. Approximately forty seconds after entering the vent… a bit longer than expected due to the heavy air flow being vented from the core… Culpepper was approaching his expected target. Then he saw the huge, swirling storm circling the core ahead of him. It looked like a half-mile-wide monster tornado. There was no way around it. Belatedly realizing what he was flying right into, Culpepper instinctively pressed his right foot hard to the floor in a brief moment of sheer panic, but there was no brake pedal.

Suddenly and with total clarity, if only for a brief second, Culpepper realized that he was doomed.

The fighter jet slammed into the howling 3000-mile-per-hour winds with the force of a train wreck, and the winds slammed the jet to the side like a sledgehammer hitting a fly, exploding the plane's already armed missiles one after the other. What was left… because it could no longer be identified as a jet… tumbled around the core with the wind, as it continued to break into smaller and smaller pieces. Within a matter of mere seconds, it had been reduced to tiny motes of flotsam barely large enough to even recognize. These circled the core a few hundred times at 3000 miles per hour before being ejected from the starboard and port vents and fluttering to the ground below like a million tiny silvery butterflies sparkling and glinting in the sunlight of a bright new day.

In a way, the silvery, glistening confetti falling in streams from the ship's vents was almost beautiful. As for Culpepper, his body had either been pounded into oblivion by the winds and by the unexpected premature explosions of his own missiles or simply absorbed by the anti-matter reactor… in which case, Culpepper may ironically actually have provided a millisecond or two of extra energy to the ship that he had sought to destroy.

Varec swallowed nervously but was clearly unsurprised when no one onboard felt so much as a bump… even as all the missiles of the fighter jet blew up one-by-one inside the core. Fortunately, the explosions were effectively damped by the ferocious winds and caused no damage whatever to the ship or to the reactor.

"What's going on there," the voice of Lieutenant Strickland crackled over the radio. "What's happening?"

"I believe you will need to replace your… jet," Varec said simply, in total seriousness… "and your agent."

There was a momentary silence over the radio before Strickland replied.

"Then the world is safe… and I take it, you are, too."

"We are all safe," Varec said, confirming Strickland's statement.

"Good," Strickland said simply, his voice a bit shaky but seeming sincere. "That's good."

"Lieutenant Strickland," the southwestern-sounding voice of the one named Zan said, returning once again to the air… "Thank you."

"For what?" Strickland asked, genuinely unassuming. "I didn't do anything… well, nothing that helped anyone."

"You did. You warned us. If we had needed to stop your agent, we could have done so… because of your warning… but it wasn't necessary for us to take extraordinary, uh, 'measures' to stop him. The reactor is quite safe when the ship is in the atmosphere… because of the cooling winds that blow around it… and in space, where it doesn't need to be cooled, it's still well protected, I assure you, even without the winds. I am sorry about your… your loss, though."

Strickland sighed. "Yes… that was a fine plane… an F-14 Tomcat."

"Yeah… well… I was referring to the pilot, actually," Zan replied.

"Culpepper?" Strickland exclaimed impulsively, momentarily sounding unexpectedly shocked. "Yeah well… thanks… but he knew what he was doing. That's the problem really. He did know what he was doing… and he would have destroyed the world."

"Lieutenant Strickland."

"Yes?"

"There are a good many other jets… and helicopters… still flying around our ship. You may want to warn them of what will happen if any of them has any idea about flying through the core like your agent did."

"I don't think that will be necessary," Strickland said, actually managing a slight smile, "I think they got the message… It's still streaming out of your vents."

>>>>>>>>>>

The best laid plans of mice and men… Isn't that what they say?

Oh, yeah, and of Antarians… and Antarian hybrids… Let's not forget them. Max, Liz, Michael, Maria, Alex, Isabel, Tess, Rayylar, Varec, and Jim from Antar in the original dimension (which Varec had now named "Dimension A") had planned to come to Dimension Y, save their doubles from a disastrous end, and return home all in… oh, maybe three weeks time, including travel. But as the expression implies, plans don't always go… well… as planned.

Okay, Varec didn't actually call them Dimension Y and Dimension A. He used the first letter and the next to last letter of the Antarian alphabet, but those letters not being present on any known earth computer, we will use A and Y.

Max and his crew had planned to stay on earth in Dimension Y perhaps two or three days, but circumstances stretched that time out to well over five weeks during which time several important things happened, including some weddings and a most unusual honeymoon… a clandestine casino… and an almost disastrous attack on both of our gangs by a treacherous shapeshifter named J'Shalo, whom the Antarian group had once known as Nasedo in their dimension but who was unknown to the local group. One can read about all of that, though, in the companion chronicle, The Night The Dreams Died, so we will skip ahead to what happened next…

From J'Shalo, the two groups learned that Kivar, in this dimension, had recently been killed by one of his enemies on Antar… and so… our heroes agreed to take their younger doubles… and another shapeshifter, named Rahn, whom they had befriended… home. That's right… home. You know… like "E.T call home…" That home. Antar. "Up there," the place where Max was pointing when Liz asked where he was from. This, of course, meant still more time before they would get to go back to their own dimension.

Thanks to Rahn, on Antar in Dimension Y, they met a shapeshifter named Ta'lan, and Ta'lan rewarded Rahn's benefactors with a huge meal and a very special gift for saving him and bringing him home. Unfortunately, the gift would have required the group from Dimension A to remain yet another day in Dimension Y (at least) and take a trip into the high mountains around the Ke'cje shapeshifters' valley, so Max and crew decided that they would forego the gift and instead return home right away. Ta'lan gave Max a sealed note to give to her double when they got back home, and she gave the younger group from Dimension Y their gift the next day in the high mountains surrounding the Ke'cje Valley.

That pretty much brings us forward in time to the original group's return to Antar in Dimension A… if we skip over the details of the trip back… and we will, because that took seven months, not merely a few days as expected. That story is yet to be told. The good news is, Max has a ghostwriter working on it from Liz's diary notes as we speak. So that's it… here we are…

Home… or is it?

tbc

Coming Up: Back home on their own Antar after a longer-than-expected return trip, our group on the New Granolith finally gets to relax. But at home, they learn that some things have changed… and some things that they thought had changed… well, read on. We're getting close to the end.