Chapter 12: Speed Run

It was decided that Tony would bring me back to my motel; by the time all was said and done, it was nearly midnight, and I was in need of some mental down-time. So, I decided that a test flight— a true test flight— of my ‘suit’.

I put on the modified wetsuit, and then a bulky layer of sweat pants and sweat shirt over top of that, and then packed my boots, gloves and helmet into my large back pack, and I was good to go; I’d have to go somewhere else to put things on and test them out. At nearly midnight, it was dark enough that I felt that I shouldn’t attract much attention from anyone on the ground.

In the control tower of the Demopolis Municipal airport— out of Demopolis, Alabama, of course— a control screen lit up, and a blip began blinking on said screen. The person at said screen, looked at the screen with puzzlement, focusing their attention on the relatively slow moving blip.

“Um, boss?” the person- a youngish male, perhaps I his mid to late twenties, called out to his supervisor, a slightly older woman in her early to mid thirties. “We’ve got an unidentified flight on an inbound flight orientation. It appears to be a small aircraft of some sort, just barely registers with the radar; no IFF, and it’s cruising right around 900 kilometers an hour, at just about level 7.”

“Level 7??” The supervisor called out in surprise, and trotted down from the slightly raised center ‘island’ of the control tower. “That’s damned near on the ground! And nothing ‘small’ moves that fast,” she added, frowning. “Check with McClellan and see if they have anything out this late at night.”

“Checking right now,” another person, this one female, sitting at another screen called out. “They’ve got it on their screens, too; they say they don’t have anything up, but they’re going on standby to scramble if it’s something.”

“How long we got?” The supervisor asked of her subordinates.

“Ten minutes, give or take,” the male answered.

Admittedly, it didn’t take long for me to get bored, flying at what I’d decided was a ‘safe’ cruising speed; it was a nice, leisurely clip for sure, but I was also sure that I could fly a lot faster than what I was. So, I kicked it up a notch.

“Holy shhhhh-sugar!” The male air traffic controller snapped, “It just went supersonic.”

“Confirmed,” the female controller added, “Speed just literally doubled; readings say that just under Mach 1-5.”

“ETA is now down to about four minutes,” another male voice chimed in.

The supervisor took a moment to gather her thoughts.

“Call it in to Barksdale and Hensley Field, in Louisiana, and all the regional airports west of us,” she ordered, heading back to her own station, “let them know we’ve got something small and fast headed their way— and what we’ve recorded so far.”

I felt comfortable with my flight speed, but I could still that it was still nowhere near what I could pull as my max speed; the GPS calculations from the smartphone programming that I’d cobbled together had me traveling at an estimated sixteen hundred klicks an hour. I did the rough translation in my head, and came up with something above Mach 1, and after a bit more thought, figured it at about one and a half. On the one hand, that was pretty cool— and even in my own head, I was dating myself, saying that— but on the other hand, I knew that I’d gone a lot faster on my first try, and I hadn’t really, really opened up all the way in any of the flying I’d done since, so I supposed that it was time. I decided that I was gonna work at doubling my speed every couple of minutes, until it felt like I was straining too hard to go any faster.

“LT! Call in from the switchboard, said DYA in ‘Bama called about a fast mover coming our way; said it was last reported just crackin’ Mach 3.”

The aforementioned LT— lieutenant, and more specifically, one of quite a number of lieutenants at the Barksdale AFB in Louisiana— snapped his head up, and strode with a quick step to the radar screen sat before one of the corporals he nominally commanded in the control tower of the base. “What the hell?” He muttered— mostly to himself— under his breath, before saying, more loudly, “Show me what they sent, and then show me what we’ve got.”

“Sir?” Another voice, another corporal, spoke up a few moments later. “Running the numbers, at Mach 3, whatever it is’ll hit our radar in about seven or eight minutes, sir.”

“Info says that contact has doubled its velocity twice already,” a third, female voice spoke up. “If that happens again, it could get here sooner than that.”

The lieutenant nodded, thinking similar thoughts. “Keep an eye on the screens for me,” he offered, frowning just a bit, “Let me run this up the chain. And get in touch with some of the air bases in Texas, just in case.”

The LT walked, double-time, back to his own desk, and picked up the phone, dialing the number for his direct superior. He was just about to sign off, after having relayed the pertinent information, when one of his corporals turned around at their desk and waved to get his attention; the young man didn’t stand on ceremony.

“Radar establishes contact has just gone hypersonic.”

“Hypersonic??” The LT said the word almost as a curse, which was picked up— the word, and the tone— by his immediate superior.

“Doubled its velocity again, sir,” the female corporal tossed over her shoulder.

“Keep track of that,” the LT commanded, relaying the commands given to him by his superior. “Record it all, and forward it to all air bases west.”

By the time I got up to what I felt was my best speed— what I could do without maybe tiring myself out, and what I would do if it wasn’t an emergency— I’d had to put some more distance between me and the ground, due to the mountains I’d had to pass over as I crossed over Arizona and California. The altimeter read out that I was somewhere around twenty kilometers up— and wasn’t that scary as fuck, if I hadn’t been able to fly? Twenty thousand meters— or just a bit more than sixty-seven thousand feet of air!!— between me and the ground, and no parachute to help me down— and it didn’t take me more than maybe ten minutes to cross over from the shoreline in California, to reach the Hawai’ian Islands. I only recognized the islands because I was up so high in the sky; the city lights and the general shape of the islands in the island chain in the growing dark told me where I was.

After thinking about it, I was impressed with myself; it had taken me less than an hour to fly from Alabama, to Hawai’i. The time display told me that it was coming up near one AM, though I was still calibrated for Alabama time; as I looked down at the islands, I was pretty sure that it was still somewhere around seven or eight PM, only early evening here, and with as high up as I was, in the beginnings of summer, I could still see the sun in the sky.