A Twist in Time (24 page)

“They won’t stop moving and we don’t have good surveillance.  They’re in the hills and headed for the boonies. You’re our best weapon.” 

______

Rae was frustrated and determined. The guys in the front seats were shouting at each other in what sounded to her like Japanese slang and completely ignoring her. The appearance of the Aeroclub Cessna off their left side shook them badly.  Rae was surprised to see Ted Arthurs in the Cessna’s right seat, but she knew Jose was off saying goodbye to his white jet.  She couldn’t go with him because the Air Force didn’t allow observers on a maintenance hop, so she went shopping for a wedding dress and then these clowns grabbed her. She vowed right then and there to get married in her flight suit. 

She was keeping busy. She found a paper clip in her flight bag, straightened it, and had successfully raised the tab on the plastic wire tie on her ankles enough to force the tie open.  Her feet were free, but she couldn’t get the same angle on the tab of the wire tie holding her wrists. She worked on the wrist wire tie with the paperclip until her fingers cramped and then she looked for a plan B.   Astronauts build and fix.  One of the things they do not do is to give up.  She found a tube of lip balm in her bag and she spread it on her left wrist and hand.  The wire tie had slack and it was below her left wrist bone, so she was hoping to fold her hand and, with the help of the lip balm, pull it through.    

She was thrown around in the back seat when the Tahoe, her Tahoe, slowed and turned left onto a much rougher road.  The sound of the Cessna’s engine went away and the pitch of the road became an uphill climb.  She worked on her hand and the two guys in the front seat kept up their argument. It was apparent that the passenger wanted to stop, give up, or whatever.  He was on the verge of tears. The driver was afraid too, but he acted like he was afraid of stopping.

With the help of the lip balm lubrication, she finally pulled her left hand through the loop of the plastic wire tie.  She had her right hand on the door handle, ready to bail out and roll, when both men in the front seat screamed hysterically.  Through the windshield she saw something coming at the SUV from the top of the mountain.  It looked like a white arrow followed by a dark storm cloud.

______

Craig pulled the Cessna south and west of the Tahoe SUV.  They were back over the highway when he and Ted saw the F-5 pop over the top of the mountain.  Jose had lined up on them and came over the top of the ridge directly above Ray’s Tahoe.  The nose of the F-5 was high and he was literally doing a tail slide down the steep mountain road toward the SUV.  As he crossed the ridge, his exhaust started a cloud of dust, rocks, and debris cascading down the mountain.  As Jose raised the nose of the aircraft even higher, he was able to increase the power to the two General Electric J85-21 jet engines.  The result was a dust and rock storm of massive proportions that followed him down the mountain and consumed the SUV.

All Jose had to do was to lower the nose of the F-5 at exactly the right moment and accelerate away.  Almost a minute later Craig had the Cessna over the spot where they last saw the SUV.  The Tahoe was stopped, apparently on top of a rock, with the left front tire off the ground.  The right rear passenger door was open.  Craig pulled back the Cessna’s throttle and side slipped back to the road at the base of the mountains. There were some vehicles on the four-lane highway, but none on the parallel access road. Craig put down the flaps and did a short field landing that allowed them to quickly turn off the north-south road onto the road up the mountain.

While Craig handled the airplane, Ted updated Jose on what they were doing and made a quick text entry into his iPhone.  After the airplane stopped, Craig spun the airplane around and killed the engine. Ted was out a moment later pushing on the tail of the plane in order to back it off the road into a little wash.  Then Ted retrieved his flight bag from the Cessna, handed Craig a Beretta M9 and a bottle of water, and they started hiking up the hill.  His 1911 semiautomatic was in his waistband and a spare magazine was in his front pocket.  A few seconds later the F-5 made a south to north pass about 1500 feet above the highway and then turned back in the direction of Nellis.  

After fifteen minutes of fast hiking uphill, Craig and Ted were both breathing hard. The sweat literally evaporated off them in the thin and dry December air, but they kept a fast pace. As they got closer to the car they stopped for a moment, watching and listening.  Craig indicated that he was going up the hill off the road to the left. With his automatic in his hand, Ted continued up the road, ready to drop into the ditch on the right side. 

He was still fifty yards from the SUV when he heard Rae’s voice say, “Ted, I’m off to your right.”  Ted didn’t stop scanning for trouble as he said, “Are you okay?”

“All I’ve got is a headache and some bruises and scrapes.  The two assholes are someplace ahead of my Tahoe.  I heard them arguing not too long ago.  They never even chased me after I jumped out.”

“Craig,” Ted called out loudly.  “Rae is over here.  Let’s fall back and deal with these guys in force.”

Craig Pulliam silently emerged from the ditch on the left side of the road and said, “You get her back down the hill.  I’ll watch your back.”

Ted dug his phone out of his shirt pocket and read the screen. “Your two vehicles and a load of people should be here in a few minutes.”  

“I got the same text,” Craig said.  “Let’s wait for them at the bottom and then see what we’ve got.”     

Ted’s phone vibrated again. “Jose’s on the ground at Nellis.  He wants to know if you’re okay.”  Rae was emerging from the rocks and climbed onto the road and turned downhill. “Let me use your phone.  I’ll ask him how he enjoyed his flight.”

______

When the two vehicles arrived from the Project, six warrant officers, some retired and some still on active duty, in the civilian equivalent of military battle rattle, unloaded. Their gear included bulging ammo pockets, semi-automatic rifles, extensive medical kits, and plenty of water.  They deployed tactically and moved in leapfrog fashion up the hill.  They found the two Japanese men sitting back-to-back on a rock a dozen feet uphill from Rae’s Tahoe.  Apparently these city boys read too much about desert rattlesnakes and mountain lions and they weren’t about to go rummaging through the rocks either to chase Rae or to try and escape over the mountain.     

After the report from the assault team, Ted and Rae drove up the mountain in a one of the Project’s trucks equipped with a bumper-mounted winch.  The two would-be kidnappers were now on separate rocks about 30 yards apart. 

“Do they have ID?” Ted asked. 

“They’re ID says they’re university students from a school in Tokyo,” Craig replied.  “They claim not to speak English.”

“If they’re really Japanese university students, that’s BS,” Rae supplied.  “They might not want to speak English, but they understand it very well.”

Rae spent about twenty minutes with each student.  Her Japanese was limited, but as she said, they understood English quite well.  She played good cop while some of the warrant officers reveled in the role of bad cop.  They growled, kicked dirt, stomped, sharpened knives, and scowled while she spoke softly and urgently. Two warrant officers earnestly searched for any kind of snake in the surrounding rocks.  The only thing they found was a sleepy and under-size scorpion, but when dangled by its tail it had the desired effect on the city Japanese.  The rest of the team kept busy winching and levering the Tahoe off the rock and back onto the road headed downhill.

Ted, Craig and Rae met next to the SUV.  Ted said, “It’s getting dark. We need to get the Cessna out of here.  Did you get anything out of them?”

“The best response I got was that they want to know what I know,” Rae said.  “They’re graduate students for one of the professors assigned to the Hokkaido University project from Tokyo.  Basically, they’re academic slave labor.  Apparently, their professor isn’t making any progress in their version of the Project.  He’s lost face and they’ve lost their funding.  This was a desperate attempt to find out what we know in order to get a jump-start, to regain honor, and to regain their jobs.  They spent every yen they had between them to send the four of them to the U.S to try and save the whole deal.  They know me and they know Fred.  That’s pretty much all they know.”

“Oh yeah,” she supplied, “the guy who was driving was pretty sure we were going to kill him at a distance.  Wonder where he got that idea?”   

“Do they know how seriously we take kidnapping in this country?” Ted asked.  “We could put them away on state and federal charges forever.”

“I made sure they understood that,” Craig said. 

Rae added, “I made sure they understood that were bringing great shame on themselves, their families, and particularly their professor.” 

“I don’t want to kidnap them, but we need to get ourselves out of here. We’ve done enough to attract attention.  Why don’t we just leave them here to hitchhike out?” Ted asked.  “I don’t want to have another thing to do with them.” 

“Sounds good to me,” Rae said. 

At that moment there was a loud pop and a flash on the hood of the Tahoe.  A small cube was suddenly sitting perfectly centered on the hood, Rae poured her water bottle on it and it steamed and sizzled.  Four sides of the cube were engraved in a bold font with one word on each side.  Read in sequence, it said, “Take them to KIGM.”

“Well,” Ted said. I guess we’ve been told. We take them to Kingman Airport.  I’ll bet that’s where they were headed with you.  They probably have an aircraft waiting there.”

Rae observed, “So leaving them on the mountain wouldn’t have worked out so well, I guess.”

“Apparently not,” Ted replied with some gloom. 

Rae and Craig got the Cessna on the edge of the highway, waited until they saw no traffic, and took off for Nellis.  Ted and two of the warrant officers headed for the Alternate Site in Rae’s Tahoe.  One of the vehicles from the Project followed them in case of breakdown.  That vehicle also carried the assault team’s weapons. Three warrant officers in the third truck drove the two Japanese students to the Kingman, Arizona airport and unceremoniously dumped them in the driveway of the general aviation terminal.    

__________

It was dark when Craig and Rae landed the Cessna at Nellis.  Jose was waiting on the ramp outside the Aeroclub.  He opened the passenger side door of the Cessna, practically lifted Rae out, and hugged her tightly.  Doctor Rae Dunnan, PhD, NASA Astronaut, and Navy SERE graduate, hugged him back and started gently crying.  It was the first time she had shown any emotion except frustration since the whole crazy episode with the Japanese students started.

When Jose put her down, she punched him in the chest and said, “You did a tail slide in an F-5!  You CAN’T do a tail slide in an F-5! But it was the most spectacular thing I ever saw. It was beautiful!” 

“Are you really okay?” Jose asked.

She held him at arm’s length and looked him up and down in the glare of the ramp lights; He was wearing his typical Air Force “green bag” flight suit. “Do you have a better fitting flight suit than that?” she asked. “I’m so over getting a wedding dress.”

“Please visit me!”

Frank J. Derfler is a retired military officer, marketing executive, magazine editor, and the author of hundreds of technical articles and books.  His love of technology and history, topped with a career inside the Washington Beltway, led him to the unique story line contained in “A Glint in Time” and “A Twist in Time”.   He welcomes your comments and suggestion on his Facebook page called “About-Time”