Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.

One of Ellie's key marriage preparations had been giving her notice at the Westside Medical Centre, citing personal and professional disagreements with some of the other doctors. Devon (they stopped calling him Jethro when Skip kicked him out) had actually proven helpful here, because he provided Ellie with a way to do that without too many questions being asked.

Skip had finally gotten sick of Devon's stupid and irritating comments, continuing with the act of chasing women all the time in public to pretend that he was a lady's man and wanting to know where he was whenever he went anywhere (it hadn't taken much effort to prove Carina correct when she pointed out that someone who's playing around all the time is more likely to expect that their partners are), so he'd kicked him out and locked him out of the complex. Devon had turned up with a group of his old frat buddies soon after that to set Skip straight (IE: Beat on him until he gave in and took him back.), but the complex security kept them waiting outside until a couple of carloads of the biggest, meanest looking guys from Thebes turned up to tell them that if they didn't stop bothering their friends, there was going to be serious trouble. Apparently most of Devon's friends were much like him (thick as a brick), because faced with obviously dangerous men like these, they came in swinging, baseball bats, which just made it worse. Of course the cops came when the ambulances were called, but they'd videoed the whole thing from several angles so it was quite clear that they had merely been defending themselves, and Roan turned up soon after as the lawyer for Thebes Security (he was staying at El Castillo to oversee the construction of the Keep, so he just waited a while after the boys left then headed out in the SLR to do his part).

He told the officers that any unjust charges or comments made to the press in regard to any Thebes Security personnel would have the Los Angeles Police Department tied up in a lawsuit that it couldn't win, and with what that would cost the city, he didn't see much chance of them keeping their jobs. They took in his Armani suit and the Mercedes SLR he'd arrived in, and decided that they weren't about to risk their jobs over some idiot frat boys who had been dumb enough to attack a group of dangerous looking characters for no good reason with baseball bats on camera, so they just politely asked for a copy of those videos for their report before they left.

Of course, after that Devon decided that Ellie owed him and told her that he was moving in with her and she was going to do whatever he said to convince everyone that they were a happy couple or her friends would be charged with assault and anything else they could think of. That was when Ellie put in her notice, because that discussion had been in the doctors' lounge and while no-one actually heard much of what was said it was quite obvious that he was threatening her and trying to force her into doing something that she didn't want to do. By their wedding day, no-one knew what had happened to Eleanor Bartowski, because even if people managed to get into the complex, Yuri was living in her old apartment now and told anyone who asked that the real estate agent had said that the woman who'd lived there had disappeared to get away from her stalker ex, something that was corroborated by the others living there, just as they said that Mike and Tara had been living in Skip's apartment for years.

Westside had never been anything but a dead end that was forced on Eleanor Bartowski by the idiots at the Cover Bureau anyway, Ellie had gotten into medicine to try and find a way to help her father, but she was getting nowhere with that. Eleanora Zaleska had graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Medical School (and magna cum laude from Harvard Law and Business Schools with the same joint JD/MBA degrees as Sarah did, a few years earlier), and that was enough to get her into the Department of Neurology at the University of California Irvine's School of Medicine, which had the best Neurology research program in Los Angeles in a research capacity, but she was starting to wonder whether she would get much further with them.

Talking this over with Chuck and the others, they pointed out that she could do everything but physically study patients right there in El Castillo, and even that would be possible if she really needed to. They also pointed out that she already had half the facilities she needed for a world class research facility in the Dungeon's medical centre, and they could get her whatever else she wanted or needed. What's more, they had far better facilities for computer modelling than any medical facility, as well as the only viable test subjects for the specific field she was looking into. She couldn't argue with Auntie Em's other point either, that the brain trust that was her family was almost certainly better than anything she could possibly find anywhere else so it just didn't make sense to shackle herself into 'doing her time' at something like UCI, going through the same old outmoded clinical processes and requirements that had nothing to do with what she wanted to find an answer to. She could be working with the best people in the world virtually, and if she needed to work face to face, she could take the Thirty Seven and that would get her just about anywhere in the world with one or two fuel stops. That was why the El Castillo Neurological Research Facility was created.

Of course, she did have to put her foot down and tell Auntie Di that she wasn't going to devote all the hours she'd been spending at the Medical Centre to Special Projects work now, she was going to have at least three or four hours a day to work on her research! After all that was what they'd created the research facility for! While Diane wanted to argue that the Special Projects work was more important than research at the moment, she did want Stephen fixed as well, and more importantly…. She knew that she'd lose most, if not all of them if she tried that. If that happened the legacy of the country's elite intelligence and special operations group that she was working to create would be finished, so she bit her tongue.

That was why Eleanor Bartowski effectively ceased to exist, and when they came back after their 'honeymoon', Eleanora Noble took up residence in her office as the CEO of Noble House Consulting, with her Principal Consultants Emmeline Boudreaux and Marie Lestrange sitting on either side. On the other side of the building, Sarah Carmichael occupied the centre office as the CEO of Carmichael Industries, with Anna Wang as her Chief Operating Officer on one side and her husband Charles Carmichael as its Chief Technology Officer on the other.

As soon as he got back to Raccoon City, Hank started calling around his buddies to find a few PC-12 airframes that were sound where they needed to be straight away, ordered half a dozen more propfans and started the boys on building the props, wings, tails, fuselage panels and other parts they'd need for them. A couple of months later, they sent the new Wagons to Pilatus to get them updated, fitted out as a PC-12Ms and registered as Pilatus prototypes. As they were the same as the first two Wagons (they'd built the second one for Pilatus to use to get type certification, just as they'd used the second Propfan for type certification and then cleaned it up and gave it back), this was a relatively simple process.

By the time Chuck's Twenty Eight had been freed up to be delivered to DC, Diane had the all requisite arrangements in place to have it housed and maintained at Andrews Air Force Base. That went smoothly because many of the influential people at Andrews held to the belief that Air Force Officers (even Generals) should be fliers, so having Old Ironpants keeping her personal transport plane there on the base and flying it herself was something that they heartily approved of. Besides, while it may not be as fancy as some of the aircraft her people flew, they knew that it was a fast and interesting plane because the Air Force had bought a few of those new Propfan models when they became available six months ago to serve as C-21A replacements.

They knew this particular plane anyway, because the Special Projects people had been flying it in various guises for years. The fact that it had been converted into a Propfan at least a year before Pilatus released them (the conversion wasn't hard to spot, because the nose being a foot shorter than the normal PC Twelve's was almost as noticeable as the two sets of props) was interesting though, and it made them wonder whether Pilatus would be releasing that other stretched and modified PC Twelve Propfan the Special Projects people had too. Those who'd known them well enough to get to look it over hoped so, because that was one seriously interesting plane, as fast as a Propfan but with more capacity than of a Skytruck.

As Ellie had predicted, Chuck, Hank and the others had meetings with SOCOM and the other Special Operations groups about their stealth helicopters a couple of weeks after the wedding. It was a done deal that they'd be getting orders from these groups, the only unknown was how long it would take them to get the budget approvals to proceed, so they began organising what they'd need to produce the parts for the conversions. The first things Chuck did were to finish the process to buy the back to back hangars which made up the 2/3 width strip right down one side of the hangar Raccoon City was in (he'd been working on this for a while but hadn't been in a hurry, which helped drive the price down), and place priority orders for the specialised multi-million dollar fabrication equipment they'd need for the large scale precision production of titanium and carbon fibre components. At the very least they'd need a couple of hundred sets of the components to do the stealth conversions, but he knew that it would be more than that all up and the terms of the contracts included very harsh penalty clauses if all units ordered weren't delivered within six months of the agreement, so they needed to be able to guarantee that they could get all the components fabricated in that time frame. The Eighty odd Million that he invested into the additional property, plant and equipment was more than the penalties would have of course (not that much more though, when he had the time he'd be making sure he found out who it was who had this vendetta against them and deal with them), but this way they had two thirds more space and the equipment to fabricate just about anything needed, which would be of use to them down the track.

Getting the 145s they used for the trial as cheap as they did prompted Chuck to look into expanding on this, and as 'The Diplomat' (This was the arms dealer persona he'd created for the mission where he got their F-5s in Ninety Eight and had maintained since then for interactions with people in that world. The name came from the fact that he'd told people who questioned why he wasn't picked up with the others that he had diplomatic immunity because he was effectively operating under a Letter of Marque from the leaders of the his country. The kicker was that that was effectively true because he had insisted on having formal documentation authorising him to do this before he'd do anything when Auntie Di first told him to do it on an operation in Ninety Four, and that documentation had been formally, if unofficially, ratified when the current President came into office.), he called on his contacts around the Middle East to locate and buy up whatever inoperable EC145s with sound airframes that they could get really cheap as soon as the SOCOM Commander and others confirmed that they'd be getting the stealth helicopters. He also told them to pick up good MD530 and MD600 airframes and wrecked EC145, AS365 and MD530 airframes with the latest avionics if they could be had really cheap. No-one asked why, as they'd heard stories about what happened to people who crossed the Diplomat, they just presumed that he had a really big order to supply helicopters to someone and had a source for cheap turbines for them, so the helicopters would probably be fixed, cleaned up and passed off to his client in quick order.

As he'd expected, there were plenty of these helicopters laying about the Middle East, because being flush with oil money tended to make them careless of their toys so there were hundreds of helicopters that had just been discarded and left where they were when they failed. Hell, there were hundreds of helicopters operating and that was only a fraction of what had been discarded. They probably could have just picked them up (and he was sure that they did in many cases, but he required paperwork to show that they'd all been legitimately purchased so they usually took the easy way out and paid a token to the owners to salve their egos and get the paperwork they needed). As soon as his contacts let him know that they'd managed to scrape together twenty eight structurally sound but inoperable EC145s to make up a full plane load for Andre, Chuck flew to Israel to pick them up. Eight more plane loads of helicopters in a similar state over the next six months pretty much cleaned out all of the EC145 hulks and the cleanest of the dead MD530s and 600s that could be found in the region. Chuck's spotters were still looking for more like them, but by then they'd picked up every EC145 they could get cheap so they didn't expect to be able to find any more than one or two a month after that. They got those helicopters dirt cheap (around Forty Four Million plus around Three Quarters of a Half Million in fuel costs etc all up to get a hundred and thirty eight 145s with sound airframes and another sixty that were damaged but probably repairable, plus forty three good MD530 airframes, eleven good MD600 airframes and the turbines, transmissions and avionics from the remains of another fifty four late model 145s or 365s and forty six late model MD 530s), because most of them had had their turbines, transmissions and other major components destroyed by flying them in sand storms and their owners had no use for them, but the airframes were all they really wanted. Chuck took the sixty damaged EC145 airframes and the MD530s and MD600s mainly to make up a full load for the plane and to stock up on the uprated turbines because the Army had committed to covering the cost of upgrading the Lakotas and Little Birds to the uprated turbines for the duration of this first conversion contract (he added the wrecked 145s, 365s and 530s and their Little Birds, Lakotas and Stingray to that to get another fifty seven spare sets of turbines for the Stealth Lakotas and fifty eight spare Stealth Little Bird turbines), so any of the damaged EC145 airframes that could be repaired and used for the conversions would be a bonus.

The ones Chuck bought the helicopters through had shipped them to Eilat in Israeli via circuitous routes. From there they were trucked a short way into the desert to a kibbutz that was actually a clandestine IDF base. This base had an air strip that was big enough for the 122 (just) and its commander knew Lou, Chuck and John, so they would be able to work in peace there while they stripped the helicopters down and loaded them into the plane. As they'd seen all too often over the past five years, taking Bertha, Boris or Andre into public airports wasted far too much of their time because everyone wanted to ask about them, so an out of the way air base like that was the best way to do what they had to and be on their way.

It would be easier when the An-70 and An-122 were certified and in production, because then they wouldn't need to keep quiet about them, but under the terms of the agreement Chuck signed with Antonov, they'd be kept as much of a secret as possible until they went into production, and that was looking like it was at least a year away. Antonov built another An-70 prototype with the original twin tail and wider fuselage and an An-122 prototype to begin testing soon after he showed them the proof that the Russians had only been trying to stop them using those designs to sabotage them, but they wanted to keep them under wraps until they went into production to prevent anyone stealing their designs again.

Chuck had been happy to sign those agreements because they got Antonov's official (and legal) commitment that the Antonov prototypes in their possession were irrevocably theirs out of it, along with the paperwork from the Ukrainian government that they needed to register and operate Bertha, Boris and Andre around the world. With Hank and the others' agreement, he committed to sharing developments that they came up with which improved the performance of the 70 and 122. They'd made a similar agreement with Mil, as luckily Mil had enough government connections to get them the paperwork they needed to register the Mi-38 as a factory prototype on the quiet. He'd also invested a few hundred million in Antonov over the last five years to help them along with the development and certification, because he knew that that investment would pay off when they got these planes to market.

With everyone pitching in, it didn't take more than a day to strip the helicopters they were taking down, mount them on the frames that had been made for the purpose in Racoon City and load them into Andre. Turbines, transmissions and other heavy items were wrapped up and secured on the floor inside the helicopter bodies to keep the weight low and they'd managed to squeeze in six rows of three airframes side by side, with five more more rows of two filling the gaps between the rows of three. They also stripped down the parts airframes, packing up the parts and loading them onto the plane. The base Commander took the wrecked airframes for his people to use as cover and target practice in their training exercises, so they actually served a purpose. When they were shot up too much to be be usable any more, they were cut up and disposed of.

While the cargo bay was full though, they were only carrying about fifty long tons, so the flight home was easy….. Dealing with Auntie Di when they got home was a different matter altogether though, because she went ballistic when Chuck suddenly disappeared and flew off to Israel in Andre with Anna, Lou and the girls (because Lou's mother was coming down to see them), and John, Sarah, Zondra, Hank and a crew to dismantle the 145s and haul them back to the States, and she'd been stewing over it ever since she found out that they were gone.

When she finally stopped to draw breath, Chuck managed to point out that, aside from the extra stealth helicopters they wanted for their own group, they stood to make at least five or six million profit on each of these One Forty Fives they brought in as Stealth Lakotas when they were converted and sold, more if they could get the uprated turbines and such they needed cheap, and they'd make two or three million on the Five Hundreds and Six Hundreds as Stealth Little Birds as well. She'd looked at him calculatingly and asked how many he was planning to keep for their group, obviously running the potential numbers through her head.

"None from of this plane load as we need to fill the orders first, we'll take some of the ones that are coming. I doubt that we'll have any trouble selling however many we get, and this load alone should net us somewhere between a hundred and forty and a hundred and ninety million clear."

She grudgingly conceded that this was a good plan and let the matter drop after another dig about the fact that he should have cleared it with her before he took the 122 and their crew out of the country.

It was easy to add most of the parts for the rest of the 145s, 500s and 600s to what they creating for the military, because the SOCOM commander and others had seen the value in their improved transmissions and the like so they overrode the original panel's rulings on that, and they'd had to set up production lines to be able to build enough parts to convert over seventy Lakotas and thirty Little Birds into stealth helicopters for the military alone. It only took the special operations groups and Department of Justice a couple of months to get the budgets approved and sign the contracts to start getting the Lakotas and Little Birds converted, but that was enough time to get the extra hangars and equipment, set up the production lines and hire the extra people they needed to cover the workload. They'd already started converting the first of the ones they picked up by the time the contracts were signed.

As each plane load of dead helicopters came in, Chuck inserted another twenty eight uprated turbines or sets of uprated turbines into the applicable orders with Turbomeca and Allison, because the Army was taking all the turbines and transmissions removed from the helicopters in the initial conversion run no questions asked to be used as spare parts and absorbing the upgrade costs from the normal to uprated turbines and the improved transmissions..… This was because the Army brass were just rubber stamping everything to avoid another reaming like the one they got from everyone over the way their people overseeing the project had refused to allow even a proper demonstration of the stealth helicopters' capabilities. The fact that the heads of all four services (along with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force) actually saw the capabilities of these stealth helicopters with their own eyes before the ones who were supposedly overseeing the project for the military did had been rather embarrassing for the Army, to say the least.

All the turbines, transmissions and such that they'd pulled out of the two hundred and ninety helicopters used for stealth conversions and hundred picked up for parts as at the end of the Stealth Helicopter Conversion contract had been shipped off to the Army as part of the deal to cover upgrade costs. They were using the Army more than a little there but Chuck was still pissed off about those jumped up idiots on the Army oversight panel's refusal to give any real consideration to what they submitted (after they'd invested most of the Two Hundred and Fifty odd Million and ten years of effort that went into Raccoon City in the property, plant and equipment needed to set up and run the stealth project for them and fabricate the components for the Stealth Helicopters), so he decided that a little pay back was in order while he had them over a barrel, Fifty or Sixty Million wouldn't break the Army, they wasted far more than that every month by refusing to get their house in order. Due to the fact that the orders added up to about five hundred and fifty uprated Turbomeca Arriel turbines and a hundred Allison C250s, with the expectation of more orders down the track, the Army had gotten the uprated turbines almost at cost anyway, which effectively meant that there was no upgrade cost for these turbines, and all but a fifth or so of the turbines and transmissions pulled out of the helicopters could be rebuilt anyway. In fact the existing Army Lakotas and Little Birds that were being used in the stealth conversion program had been selected because they needed expensive turbine and transmission overhauls after operating in Iraq, and even the Army had taken advantage of the offer to buy converted Stealth Lakotas and Little Birds from Raccoon City for five of the two dozen Stealth Lakotas and ten of the fifteen Stealth Little Birds they were getting, so no-one questioned turbines and transmissions coming back flagged as needing overhauls.

They were delivering the Stealth Lakotas and Stealth Little Birds as they were completed and tested, and as Chuck expected this resulted in more orders when people saw what they were capable of. He told his spotters in the Middle East to keep looking for more airframes because as he said to Auntie Di, he was pretty sure they could sell as many as they could make, in time if not as part of the original contracts. In fact they already had more foreign orders waiting on government clearances to sell the stealth helicopters to them. That was why he was picking up those extra airframes for parts, to stock up on the spare turbines etc they needed for future orders and improve their profit margin on them.

Chuck had created their defense contractor company, Raccoon City (it was meant to be a play on Skunk Works, but they let it go when gamers associated it with the Resident Evil game), as a shell company in Ninety Seven to run their operation up at Plant 42 when Auntie Di took control of the Stealth Helicopter Project after Hank was co-opted into it. At first the primary reason for creating Raccoon City was to cover up where they got the sort of money needed to run an operation of that nature (which was why it was based in the Cayman Islands), but when he stopped to think about it he decided that if the stealth conversions panned out the way they expected, they should be the ones who reaped the fruits of their labours, rather than letting someone else do it, so he expanded the shelf company into a full working business with registered offices in Plant 42. As Chuck was the one who owned, managed and funded Raccoon City, it became a fully owned subsidiary of Carmichael Industries when it was created like their other companies.

At least with total control of the company he didn't have to argue with Auntie Di over the way it was operated. When she tried to dictate what they were going to do at the start he told her that either he was going to run it or she was, but if she wanted to run it she was going to be the one who had to do everything, not him! Auntie Di was bright enough to know that he meant what he said, and that this operation would go better with him running it, so she backed off and dealt with him on a professional basis as the government representative working with the defense contractor running the project. It also meant that she had to hold her tongue over the fact that he had eight highly qualified and well paid aeronautical engineers working full time for a company that wasn't producing anything much of the time, and he was making use of his father's genius as well. She made a point not to ask about where the tens of millions that were going into the company every year came from to maintain plausible deniability. Of course, the cheeky little scamp made it difficult to do that when he openly operated under the persona of 'The Diplomat' and used a Jolly Roger as his computer background when he was doing this work.

When they started the Stealth Helicopter Project, they'd bought a large hangar (a very large hangar, as through Auntie Di's connections they'd managed to get the Air Force's old C-5 hangar which had originally been built in the early Eighties to take up to three C-5s written off in the Air Force's systems and sold to them cheap because it had been sitting largely unused for over a decade, but that worked out well for them when they needed somewhere to hide the An-122 and two An-70s) at Plant 42 to operate in because half of the people co-opted into the Stealth Helicopter Project were based there and the rest could fly straight in, and set up shop with all the equipment they needed to get to work. Having that much space had proved its worth soon enough when they acquired the Tigers, the Mark V SOC boat, the Thirty Seven, the EuroMil and especially when they got Bertha, Boris and Andre.

The production and testing process for the Stealth Lakotas and Stealth Little Birds was gruelling, especially when they had to start dipping into the the airframes that needed to be repaired before they could be used, but luckily over half of the repairable airframes only needed minor repairs and the engineers had created the specialised jigs and equipment to do this when they created the Wagon, so they didn't slow the process down too much. The last of the 159 Stealth Lakotas and 52 Stealth Little Birds were delivered six months after they started work though, and it was agreed by all and sundry that the Stealth Helicopter Project was a resounding success. The military, Department of Justice and their allies, and even the CIA were quite impressed with the Stealth Lakotas' performance and accepted that they'd gotten value for money, and not counting the extra money Chuck sank into the property, plant and equipment for the fabrication of the stealth parts, Raccoon City had made $1.15 Billion dollars in profit from the operation. The seventy two Stealth Lakotas made them around $5.5 Million and the thirty Stealth Little Birds around $2.5 Million per machine overall from the U.S. Military, the Department of Justice's twenty six Stealth Lakotas made them around $6.5 Million and four Stealth Little Birds $3 Million apiece, the fifty seven Stealth Lakotas and eighteen Stealth Little Birds they got sign off to sell to allied military and intelligence bodies made them around $7 Million and $3.5 Million apiece respectively (their original two Stealth Little Birds were cleaned up and went to the base they used to pick up the airframes, they got the much improved machines as a thank you for their help) and they got around $9 Million each on the four Stealth Lakotas they finally gave in and let the CIA get. (Part of the terms of the deal was strict confidentiality in regard to price or any other details and the others weren't willing to jeopardise their chance to get more down the track if they needed them, so the CIA didn't know that the $10 Million plus apiece that they were paying for their Stealth Lakotas was at least two million more than the others were paying. With the fortunes that the CIA had stolen from people, they could certainly afford it.)

By the end of the Stealth Helicopter Conversion contract, the team at Raccoon City had built a hundred and seventy five Stealth Lakotas and sixty Stealth Little Birds, though eight of the Stealth Lakotas were the improved versions for their own group, which included the replacements for their first two Stealth little Birds. They had completed over one and a half a day on average and that was quite an effort. Chuck had been thinking about this and decided that they deserved to be rewarded for achieving all that in six months.

When the last of the Stealth Lakotas were delivered for the contract, Chuck gave everyone working on the project a week off and told them that they ('they' being him) had decided to implement a profit sharing scheme for the Stealth Lakota conversions. Hank and other eleven who made up the core team that had been working on this for over ten years would be getting half a percent of the profits each, and the other thirty who they'd brought in to help fabricate the components and assemble and test the helicopters would each get one tenth that much... and of course that would apply to the profit they made off the Stealth Ospreys as well.

John and most of the family laughed at Chuck when he couldn't understand why everyone at Raccoon City was falling all over themselves trying to thank him. Carina eventually sat him down to explain the facts of life to him.

"Chuck, just how much money do you think most people make?"

Chuck started mentally reviewing the pay scales for the on the books personnel that made up their groups. Carina was no fool though, she knew what he was doing and quickly cut him off.

"No. I said what most people make Chuck! The majority of the imaginary, sorry... virtual personnel who make up these groups of your's are paid at least two to three times what most people make."

She saw the surprise on his face as he processed that and internally breathed a sigh of relief, as it looked like she was getting through to him after all. But it was her turn to be surprised when he said. "I always thought that all that minimum wage bullshit Ellie, Auntie Em, Mom and I had to live with up until Ellie and I finished university was an exception and most people in America lived a lot better than that. The families of everyone we went to school with were all well off, we were the only poor kids at the school."

John laughed at that. "Come on genius, surely you know that you were set up in the one of the best established old money districts in LA because your godmother wanted to make sure that you and your sister got the best education, and the well established rich people always have the best schools and teachers. Of course everyone you went to school in Acadia with was rich! How can you be so brilliant and so thick at the same time Chuck?"

Sarah cut him off. "That's because whether or not she planned it that way from the start, my aunt made sure that Chuck and Ellie never had a chance to fit in so that she could keep her geniuses on tap all the time to work for her! Casey, you've been around Chuck for at least fifteen or sixteen years now haven't you?"

"More like seventeen."

She nodded. "And in that time, how often has he been able to go out and be an ordinary guy, have fun and get to know people?"

Casey's jaw dropped as he processed what she was saying and tried to think of a time when Chuck had had a chance to lead anything like an ordinary life. His expression turned grimmer by the minute as he kept coming up blank. There had always been piles of work to do or missions to rush off to, and the closest thing to fun he could remember Chuck having was when he was racing cars or bikes or flying, or maybe running those fast special operations boats like that Mark V SOC prototype they didn't officially know he had (even though it was sitting on a trailer up in Raccoon City) up a tight, twisting river at speed. When they went to a bar or restaurant with the guys after a mission he'd usually just sit there pretending to enjoy himself because he couldn't really relate to the way the others were having fun. Chuck could charm and handle just about anyone easily, especially women, but that was always in terms of the mission, he couldn't think of a time he'd seen him having a genuinely relaxed, casual conversation with anyone other than Skip, Jeff, Anna, Lou or the family.

When she saw he'd gotten her point Sarah went on. "When Chuck was trying to explain to me why he fought Auntie Di to make sure he got the F Fives registered for Ellie and the others to use, he mentioned that both he and Ellie have been working eighteen to twenty hours a day for most of the last sixteen years or so... I'm guessing the memories you just went through confirmed that, didn't they?"

He nodded grimly.

"After Chuck casually dropped the bombshell on the Thirty Seven about you guys having access to over a hundred million available to pay for the plane when Auntie Di organised it, I knew that there was more to this operation than I was being told so I looked into it. You would have been around at the time he was scraping up the seventy or eighty million that he paid out for the initial property, plant and equipment to get Raccoon City started... When he was sixteen! You were also there when he dropped thirteen million on that arms dealer nine months later to buy the F Fives and his SOC Boat and stock up the group's armouries, then turned around and took that and another hundred and twenty odd million off him when he busted him a month later. And you know as well as I do what sort of budgets Captain and then Admiral Carmichael has been managing to keep his special operations and intelligence groups going since Nine Eleven!... so why the hell would you be surprised that Chuck can't understand why the men and women he just gave several years' wages to as a part of the profit sharing scheme that he thought up and implemented to try and do the right thing would be so grateful? He's never had any frame of reference for ordinary people! You and Uncle Bry are probably the closest things to ordinary people he's known most of his life for god's sake and you're hardly ordinary Colonel!"

Casey hung his head in shame as Sarah turned to Chuck. "Honey, what Carina was trying to make you understand is that it's only to be expected that most people are going to be both shocked and extremely grateful to be given nearly Six Hundred Thousand dollars unexpectedly, let alone Five and Three Quarter Million like Hank and the others got, because to most people that's an unbelievable fortune. It was the right thing, and a very good thing, to do for the people who made this work for us, but you gave them one hell of a shock when you did it. Casually telling them that they can expect more yet if the Osprey project works out probably broke some of them. You have to remember that while you've been routinely dealing in tens or hundreds of millions as you organise these operations around the world and the concerns you've set up to pay for them over the last ten or twelve years, that's just something that most people can't understand..."

She recalled something that might help get the point across. "Did you see Hank's face when you told Roan how high he could go with Gulfstream to close that deal?"

Chuck nodded.

"Well that's the sort of reaction that most people have to casually dealing in multi million dollar figures! Hank knows that the group has the budget to do whatever it wants to, but he was still shocked when you talked about dropping Forty Million on Gulfstream as if it were nothing but pocket change."

Chuck nodded thoughtfully, starting to get the point of what they were saying.

Most of the next half hour was taken up by the others trying to apologise for laughing at him, and asking about what Sarah said about the hours he and Ellie worked. Later that night Sarah had her own apologies to make to Chuck, because that discussion had made a lot of earlier points fall into line for her too.

Chuck flew up to Plant 42 before dawn the next morning with Sarah to talk to Hank about the matter. Hank was delighted to hear the story of how Sarah had taken John down a peg or two, but he as aghast at what they shared about what Chuck and Ellie's lives had been like. It hit him all the harder because like John he realised that this had been going on right in front of him whenever he'd been working with those two and he'd never taken the time to see it.

They talked to the rest of the guys and everyone agreed to continue on a business as usual basis. They still had plenty of work to do, fabricating the parts for the two dozen Ospreys that they would be converting for the first batch, and maybe another two dozen after that if the Marines and Air Force got budget approval to go ahead. If they got the approval for more, this would most likely be repeated a few more times.

The ones in the core team asked permission to use the facilities to fabricate some parts for themselves in their free time though, because they'd decided that now that they had the money and access to facilities like they had in Raccoon City, they'd like to build up their own Wagons.

All of the core team at Raccoon City were pilots, and they'd been doing most of the test flights with the Twenty Eights, Wagons, Little Birds and Lakotas when they were modifying them. They were all quite proud of how the Wagons turned out, as they were great planes to fly, and very practical and fast to boot. As they had all the moulds and facilities to make up the carbon fibre wings, tails, fuselage panels, props and the like and the rest of the titanium components that they'd designed and created at Raccoon City, they were asking leave to use the facilities to fabricate the parts they needed to build up their own Wagons in their free time, because if they were building most of the components themselves and managed find the airframes they needed at a reasonable price, they shouldn't have any trouble building up their own planes with the Five and Three Quarter Million he gave them. Chuck had no trouble agreeing to them making use of the facilities as long as it didn't interfere with their main operations.

Before they left though, Hank asked Chuck if he would also be willing to do a deal to let him buy one of the 145 airframes and a set of the uprated turbines and stealth components that they'd fabricated at whatever he thought was a reasonable margin over what it cost him. Chuck had no problem with that of course but he had to ask... "I thought you really wanted to build up your own Wagon Hank? There's no problem doing a deal for the Lakota bits but I would have thought that you'd take the plane over a helicopter."

"Oh the Wagon is my first priority Chuck, but when I was picking up the PC Twelve airframes to make up the extra Wagons as you asked, I got one from a buddy who's a... let's just call him an aircraft wrecker... and he had another airframe there that was sound where it needed to be that he was willing to let me have for a really good price. I already had the three airframes I needed but I've wanted my own Wagon ever since we built the first one and I had enough tucked away to cover it, so I said I'd take it. When he found out that it was really for me he gave me buddy's rates so I've got a little more to play with and it's in one of the containers out back. I figure that I should have enough to build up both it and the Stealth Lakota properly between that Five and Three Quarter Million and what I have left in the bank. If not, I'll just put the Wagon back into the container until I have the money to finish it."

The others looked thoughtful when he said that, thinking that they may not be able to afford both a Wagon and a Lakota (yet... Chuck had already told them that they could expect more bonuses when the Ospreys were done), but a Wagon and a Little Bird or Loach should be doable and their Stealth Little Bird and Stealth Loach were damned nice helicopters (maybe even more than the Lakota), so they asked if they could get the same deal on the helicopters. Chuck said of course they could.

Chuck looked at Hank musingly and asked how many other viable PC-12 airframes he'd found when he was looking for the airframes for extra Wagons that would be worth getting.

Hank stopped to think about that and said. "There are plenty available down south, after Katrina they generally just stripped the engines and anything else they could sell out of anything that was damaged and left them out back. I just took the first ones I found that met our criteria to get started on the job quicker."

Chuck nodded. "OK, use Andre to go down there and pick up PC Twelve airframes that are suitable and worth what they're asking... you're the best judge of that. Try to pick up enough for the guys and maybe one or two more if you can, we have five Wagons now that we've gotten the second one back from Pilatus but one or two more wouldn't hurt... That reminds me, we need to organise to take the other four to Pilatus to get them registered as PC Twenty Fours when we have a chance..."

"If you see anything else that strikes your fancy and you can fit it in you can get it too, but the PC Twelves have priority. You guys can have your pick of the airframes at three percent over what it costs us to get them here, and the same goes for the parts. When things are quiet, build up whatever's left over as Wagons for the group, along with the rest of the Six Hundreds and Five Hundreds and as many of the One Forty Five airframes that are viable to repair and build up as Stealth Lakotas, and our Osprey airframes as Stealth Ospreys. You can add your turbines for the Wagons and other components to the orders for our's to get a better price if you like. The same deal applies to the One Forty Five and Five and Six Hundred airframes and parts, and you guys can have your pick of the airframes before you start building up the rest. Get rid of any One Forty Five airframes that aren't viable to repair, there's no sense keeping them around, and we'll decide how many Stealth Lakotas, Little Birds and Loaches will be added to the Special Projects fleet when we know how many we have. There's no great rush on the extra machines for the Group, use your free time to get your's done and work on the rest when things are quiet here."

Hank and the others agreed that that arrangement was exceedingly fair and Hank said he'd fill the rest of the guys in, then Chuck and Sarah left to fly back down to Bob Hope (as they couldn't fly the Loach back to El Castillo until after dark). Chuck wasn't too surprised to hear that Hank, Yuri and some of the other guys left on the parts run that afternoon, because they were eager to get started on their planes.

There had been one major surprise when Chuck and Hank went back to Plant Forty Two for the meeting with the military that Ellie told Hank to expect though. While the Navy, Marines and SOCOM were quite prepared to change to Lakotas for most stealth operations because they agreed that the extra capacity made them more useful for most covert missions, when they saw that the EuroMil sitting there had obviously been converted into a stealth helicopter as well, they wanted to know whether the same stealth modifications could be made to their V-22 Ospreys too. After they'd discussed it Hank and the rest of the team agreed to give it a try, and the Marines officially released and signed over the dozen MV-22 airframes that were sitting at AMARG over to the Special Projects Group to use for the trial. They didn't know how many, if any, of those airframes would be usable for the trial but they were desperate to see what these guys could come up with, so to avoid any possible delays in the project they just had all of the airframes allocated to the Special Projects Group and shipped to Plant Forty Two in hope that they'd be able to make up at least one or two that worked out of the remains.

Hank and the other operational specialists had been co-opted to the stealth project because they were the best their respective services had, with decades of experience with all sorts of military aircraft (Hank chose the other three because they were buddies, as people at their level found it hard to find someone worth talking to), so they knew about all the operational problems with the Ospreys, especially the turbines. That was why one of the first things they did was contact GE about whether they were prepared and able to supply the turbines that they had submitted for the V-22 trials, and GE was happy to supply the latest version of the uprated GE38 turbines that had been developed from the GE27s they submitted for the V-22 to them at cost. The team also got to work building improved titanium transmissions for the Ospreys like they had for the helicopters, because they didn't trust the existing gearboxes to be strong enough to handle the load when the turbines were running at full power for stealth operations. Having the production lines set up to produce the Stealth Lakota parts freed up enough time for the core team to get a working model of a Stealth Osprey in the air in under three months, and they had what they wanted to present ready in under four and a half months..

They were fabricating the components for and building up their own personal Wagons and Stealth Lakotas and Loaches (they decided on the Six Hundreds over the Five Hundreds) in their free time in between converting the Ospreys, building up the rest of the Stealth Ospreys and Stealth Lakotas and creating the Propfan components for Pilatus. On top of that, they were fabricating a large amount of titanium and carbon fibre components for the G-65 flight test-bed, and this was a much bigger job than they had originally envisioned, because they were fabricating much of the fuselage, and they were making two of most panels and such because they were going to be used to create the next one as well. Hank was going to get the plug pulled on this until one of his buddies at Gulfstream filled him in on what was happening. The components they were fabricating were going into the two airframes that would be their's once the testing was done, and the purpose of this was to accelerate the creation of flight test-beds with the proper size and form to get enough flight data to work out the numbers that they needed build the 'proper' G-65 prototypes. Once the 'proper' prototypes were built, their two would be cleaned up and delivered to them, with the requirement that they continue to provide flight data, even with the proviso that it would need to be adjusted to account for the different flight characteristics of their much lighter prototypes. One concession Hank got out of this was that his full sized cargo hatch remained in the build for these two prototypes at least, they could scrub it from later builds but if these were going to be their planes they'd have the damned cargo hatch!.

When they first demonstrated the Stealth Ospreys, the Navy and Marines weren't too happy about having lost the fast fold capability for the rotor blades, but they were quick to accept the trade off of their maintenance people taking 10 or 15 minutes to fold the blades instead of the 90 second mechanised process when the increased speed, range and vertical take off capability were displayed…. Especially when it was pointed out that the different operational model for the Ospreys meant that the thicker rotor blades which were a big part of the increase in performance and range would give them quite acceptable stealth capabilities in asymmetric mode for the vast majority of their operations.

They were really sold though when it was demonstrated that another Stealth Osprey with a modified version of the swivelling wing and removable nacelles and rudder fins could be converted between flight mode and a storage format that would fit into a C-5 Galaxy's hold in around an hour, and in fact two Ospreys could fit into a Galaxy's hold in this format. This locked it in for the Air Force, and the Marines wanted the operational airlift capability too.

The Stealth Ospreys were looking likely to be an even bigger operation than the Stealth Lakotas, because the Air Force wanted all of the Ospreys they operated for SOCOM converted to gain to the airlift capability and increased performance and range (and reliability, as they found over time) that the modifications gave as much as the stealth capabilities. So did the Marines, but they eventually agreed to start with just a dozen each for special operations missions, as even that was going to cost five hundred million all up.

Boeing wasn't happy that they were being made to supply new Ospreys without the parts that were fitted for the stealth upgrade, or that the parts this defense contractor had created for the conversion were both patented and officially classified as a national security matter, because that meant Boeing couldn't cut them out of the loop and use what they'd developed themselves. The fact that the Navy and Air Force used penalty clauses in the contracts to force them to transfer the agreed value of those omitted parts to the airframes was just twisting the knife.

Rolls Royce weren't happy either, because the Navy and Air Force had used the unreliability of their turbines to cancel their contracts, and made them come up with an agreed buy back plan for the faulty turbines they had supplied as they were being replaced.

GE on the other hand was quite happy, because ultimately they were looking to sell hundreds of their GE38 turbines.

By the end of the year, they'd converted two batches of two dozen Ospreys, netting another $700 Million in profit for Raccoon City, which on turn meant $3.5 Million more for Hank and the core team and another $350 Thousand each for the rest of them. The car park out the back of Raccoon City was looking like it belonged to a millionaires' country club because the best of the American made and European machinery was well represented. It had also given the core team the money to complete their machines, so there was usually a line of Wagons, Lakotas and Loaches out the front.

With the tactical value of the Ospreys, the core team at Raccoon City decided that whatever it took to recover the dozen Ospreys that had been formally signed over to the Special Projects Group to develop the Stealth Ospreys, it would be worth it. Chuck agreed, so they were all repaired and built up as Stealth Ospreys (improved versions of what the military got, the five which had been too damaged to worth recovering especially because they were essentially a brand new design now, a little bigger but lighter, faster, and with increased capacity for both internal and slung loads). As with everything else in the Special Projects fleet, their Ospreys were officially owned by Raccoon City so the military couldn't touch them.

The eleven Wagons, two Lakotas and ten Loaches that the guys had built up for themselves (and Ellie and Anna's Loaches and Chuck's Stingray) were also listed as Special Projects aircraft so that they had the necessary clearances to go onto military bases. This meant that by the end of 2008, the Special Projects air fleet was officially made up of two F-5Fs, one C-37B, two modified C-130J-30s, one modified C-5M, twenty modified U-28As (two U-28 Propfans and eighteen Wagons), one modified C-145, twelve modified CV-22s, one modified MH-68A, one modified MH-60, twelve modified OH-6s and twelve modified UH-72Bs.

While the real details of the An-70s, An-122 and Mi-38 were in the Air Force's records, under the terms of the agreements with Antonov and Mil those records were sealed, so the designations for the aircraft that were closest approximations in the Air Force's fleet were used to identify them, just as the 600s were officially identified as OH-6s.

Yuri's amphibian had been a struggle to get registered, but they managed. Hank saw his eyes light up when he saw the remains of an An-38 in one of the aircraft bone yards they went to looking for PC-12 airframes, and he reminded him that Chuck had said that they could get what they wanted as long as they could fit it in. He questioned that decision when Yuri then made him backtrack two states to pick up remains of the Canadair CL-215 he'd seen there, but he was intrigued at what he was planning. He was getting excited by the time Yuri finished telling him, and he and the other guys had all helped Yuri work on his project. His amphibian was the result of that project, a 51 foot long amphibious aircraft that had an An-38 fuselage and tail married to cut down CL-215 wings, hull and undercarriage (with much of both replaced with the improved components they created of course). It was powered by a pair of the down scaled propfans and as expected, it performed quite well, cruising quite happily at 350 knots and retaining most of the An-38's STOL capability. Aside from the bigger wingspan it wasn't much bigger than the Wagons, but it was roomier inside due to the taller and wider cabin. Yuri had always like the flexibility of amphibians but was unimpressed with existing amphibians, so when he saw the An-38 and remembered seeing the remains of the CL-215 in the previous bone yard, his mind went into overdrive, working how he could build the amphibian he wanted out of the two.