PACIFIC OCEAN
Fifty nautical miles off the coast of San Francisco
10:31 AM
* * *
Tony ‘Bucket’ Mancuso pulled the nose of his F-35 Lightning II to the right, guiding the jet into a broad arc. Racing along at zero point nine Mach, he tracked the G-forces in his helmet-mounted display as he began the morning’s G-warmup.
One, one point five, two G’s…
His body pressed against the seat, and his head felt heavy. He inhaled sharply. When his lungs were full, he closed his throat, keeping the air in. Simultaneously, he clenched his muscles, tightening his calves, thighs, and core.
Two point five, three G’s…
The air bladders in his G-suit inflated automatically, squeezing him like a python’s coils.
“Hicckk. Hicckk. Hicckkkk,” He exhaled short bursts of air, practically spitting into his oxygen mask. It sounded gross, but it helped keep pressure in his chest and the blood from draining from his brain.
Four G’s…
He held the stick steady, holding the jet centered in the head-mounted display.
Five, Five point five…
He couldn’t move. Effectively, he weighed nearly a thousand pounds. Pinned against the seat, every muscle in his body strained frantically.
Six G’s…
The flexing, the breathing exercises, and the G-suit were now crucial to his survival. By the time he noticed the signs of oxygen deprivation: the loss of color perception, the tunneling of his vision, he’d be on the verge of G-LOCing. The F-35 had only a single seat; there was no co-pilot to take over if he passed out.
Slowly, he eased off on the stick. The jet straightened out, and the G’s ticked down.
Five, four, three…
His heart hammered in his chest, and he was breathing hard, but his vision was clear. That was good. The purpose of the exercise was to warm up the muscles, get the blood flowing, and prepare him for basic fighter maneuvers. It wasn’t supposed to kill him.
Nineteen thousand feet below, the Pacific Ocean spread out blue and gleaming. There were no ships, no clouds, no landmarks of any sort, only the sun, the waves, and the great curve of the horizon. For a moment, he felt a deep sense of vulnerability, the vast expanse an irrefutable reminder of his own puny insignificance.
Bucket grimaced behind his oxygen mask. The sensation pissed him off. He didn’t get nervous. He didn’t get frightened. He didn’t contemplate mortality. His job was to fly at the edge of human ability, as if nothing bad could ever happen to him. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d backed down. Heck, he’d been given his callsign because some non-commissioned officer once bet him he couldn’t slam twenty tequila shots. He’d barfed in a bucket, but he’d walked away a hundred dollars richer.
And now he was freaking out because of a pretty view? What the hell was wrong with him?
Before he could further ponder this sense of existential vulnerability, there was a flash of movement as “Wizzer,” his wingman, took a position a hundred feet abreast. A little closer than necessary, but not unusual. Wizzer probably wanted to chat off comms.
Wizzer and Bucket had memorized a long list of hand signals as part of their flight training. With only a few quick gestures, they could convey compass headings, fuel levels, and even the relative severity of a hydraulic malfunction—literally jet-pilot sign language.
Bucket watched closely as Wizzer raised a gloved hand and extended his middle finger.
That one wasn’t in the manual, but the meaning was clear enough: Wizzer was still pissed about last night’s poker game. It wasn’t his fault that Wizzer had flopped a full house when he’d had a quad of queens. Wizzer needed to tighten up and stop acting NAFOD when he thought he had the nuts.
Slowly, Bucket mirrored the hand gesture.
Instantly, Wizzer accelerated and sliced in front of him, afterburner blazing. Bucket bounced in his seat as he flew through the jet wash.
Asshole. It was one thing to be pissed about a bad beat; it was another to endanger your wingman. Bucket was considering the most vicious way to bring this up in debrief when the radio squawked, and the formal voice of the Red Crown, the CAG Cruiser Command and Control, piped into his helmet speaker.
"Lightning one, there’s a bogey that isn’t talking. Investigate. Vector eight niner, thirty-five, at fourteen thousand, beam.”
“Wilco,” he replied tightly.
This was annoying. He couldn’t wait to run some basic fighter maneuvers, and he seriously needed to light Wizzer up after that stunt. No one thumped him with jet wash and got away with it.
But he couldn’t ignore an order. There was a bogey—an unidentified aircraft—to investigate. Grumbling under his breath, he pulled the stick to the right, directing his F-35 east toward San Francisco. As he reached the bearing, Wizzer slid into formation a mile away. This time, there were no hand signals. Bucket smirked as he remembered Wizzer’s expression when he’d thrown down the queens. His eyes had bugged out like he was about to G-LOC.
Bucket checked his speed. Six hundred knots. Bogey was fifty miles out. They had four minutes until intercept.
A minute later, Wizzer broke radio silence, “Bucket, you see anything on eyeball?”
Eyeball was what they called the electro-optical targeting system. While there was contact on radar, Wizzer was correct; they weren’t picking up anything on either the infrared or visual spectrums. This was odd. He should be able to see the bogey on more than one sensor.
"Positive on radar. Confirm negative on eyeball,” he replied.
He glanced again at the distance: twenty-one, twenty, nineteen nautical miles. He still had a bit of time. The bogey would be on the other side of the horizon until he was within fifteen miles. He studied his instruments, gleaning whatever information he could. Based on how quickly he was approaching, the bogey appeared stationary.
Which was really strange. Airplanes moved. Motion was literally one of the prerequisite ingredients for flight. Air flowed faster over the wing’s upper surface than over the lower. That’s what produced a pressure differential. That’s what generated lift. If you weren't moving, then the air wasn't flowing. If the air wasn’t flowing, then you were falling straight into the ocean.
Well, unless you were a drone, a helicopter, a weather balloon, or a radar anomaly.
But this was too big to be a drone, helicopters had transponders, and weather balloons floated up in the stratosphere at sixty thousand feet. That left a radar anomaly.
Not a bad theory. Anomalies were pretty common. Both thermal noise and signal-processing loss could produce false positives. And, of course, it could simply be a bug in the radar software. But it was weird that his radar, Wizzer’s radar, and Red Crown’s radar were all observing the same anomaly.
Bucket briefly considered a final possibility, but he wasn’t ready to go there yet. He checked the distance. Five miles, four point three miles. He was well within visual range, now. He peered again through the windscreen.
Land had come into view, and with it, the city of San Francisco. To his left hung the great span of the Golden Gate Bridge. To his right jutted the tripod-shaped Sutro Tower. Straight ahead, the long green strip of Golden Gate Park swept up from the sea towards the city skyline.
But there was no sign of any aircraft.
"Do you have a visual?" asked Red Crown.
Bucket squinted, peering through the windscreen. He wanted to be the first to make visual contact. But there was nothing.
"Negative on visual.”
“See anything, Wizzer?” said Bucket.
“No joy. Bogey remains on the radar.”
This was turning into a wild goose chase, but orders were orders. Bucket directed his F-35 toward the invisible bogey, cutting his speed to three hundred knots. As they crossed from the sea to the city, a weird, unnerving sensation crawled over his skin.
He drew in a breath, trying to steady his nerves. The sky was empty. No clouds or fog. There was nothing to be worried about
He toggled the radio. "Wizzer. Still no joy?”
"Affirmative.”
Ok, that settled it. This had to be an anomaly. Bucket spoke to Red Crown, “Visual ID negative. Bogey appears to be a radar malfunction.”
“Roger. Fly within five hundred feet and confirm.”
Bucket swore under his breath. Of course, they didn’t believe him, but he understood that a confirmed anomaly meant a day's worth of paperwork. The Navy couldn't have contacts randomly appearing on the radar array of a thirteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier.
He angled the F-35 so that he would fly within five hundred feet of the invisible bogey, which appeared to be hovering over Golden Gate Park.
Again, that skin-crawling sensation swept over him. No longer simply unnerving, now it was like a predator stalking its prey, and he was the prey. All his muscles clenched tight, his body preparing to flee.
His grip tightened on the stick, and he heard himself speaking to Red Crown, “I’m not sure about this—”
His voice cracked. He couldn’t seem to work his tongue correctly.
“Say again?” said Red Crown.
What the hell is wrong with me? He thought as a primal terror took hold. Blood pounded in his ears. His eyes swam. Bile rose in his throat. The sense of dread was so keenly visceral that he nearly screamed.
Am I greying out? But he knew he wasn’t pulling any G’s. Airspeed was only three hundred knots. This was something else entirely.
“Lightning one, come in?” said Red Crown.
Bucket fought against the terror, trying to steady himself. Between panicked breaths, he managed to respond.
“I’m breaking off… Problem with the engine…”
Wizzer leaped at the chance to take over, “I got this.”
As Bucket turned away, Wizzer banked his jet sharply, heating up the invisible bogey. Bucket pulled into a low-g turn, watching Wizzer while simultaneously trying to come to terms with the fact that he was having a panic attack.
And yet, he still couldn’t get it out of his head that something truly bad was about to happen.
“Wizzer, I don't think that's a good idea.”
Wizzer remained on course, barreling toward the radar glitch at three hundred knots.
“Wizzer. Knock it off.”
It was an order, but Wizzer ignored him. Bucket watched Wizzer’s F-35 race toward the glitch. Closer and closer.
“Ok, you’ve proved your—”
Wizzer’s F-35 detonated in a brilliant flash of jet fuel.
Bucket white-knuckled the stick as his jet bucked in the shockwave. A scream reverberated in the rubber of his facemask.
“Lightning two status?” said Red Crown.
Bucket continued to scream incoherently as he white-knuckled the throttle.
“Lightning one, status?”
In front of him, the air shimmered. Was something there? Or was it after-images from the explosion? It was impossible to make sense of his surroundings. He couldn’t think. A vise-like band of terror constricted his skull.
His vocal cords convulsed in a ragged ululation as something monstrous thrust itself into his consciousness.
Bucket tried to turn away, to punch the afterburner and escape, but he’d lost any semblance of bodily autonomy. His mouth wrenched open in a silent scream. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. Hot piss filled his flight suit. Slowly but inextricably, the thing in his mind forced the hand holding the flight stick forward. The nose of the F-35 tipped downward. The horizon receded, and blue-green foliage filled the windscreen.
“Come in, Lightning One.” Red Crown spoke as if from a great distance.
Desperately, Bucket tried to pull up, but he was paralyzed, unable to move even a finger as he barreled towards Golden Gate Park.
His heart thrashed in his chest. Tears streamed from his eyes. He was stuck within his body as something incomprehensibly awful controlled his every muscle.
The last thing he saw was the terrible shape of a glowing saucer hovering above the eucalyptus trees.