Chapter 363: The Home Team Fights 'Back'

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

The second battle in our war was going to be at Beale Air Force Base. According to the very helpful Wikipedia, it's the USAF's (US Air Force's) largest UAV operations center, almost certainly where the UAV that had taken out Mom and Dad's bedroom had been operated from and out of [half right, as it'd been operated from a Northrop Grumman's facility in LA]. The Government, media and public would recognize the appropriateness of the Guardian Angel's counterattacking Beale AFB.

I'd been so pressed for time recently that I'd not done as much research as I wanted, only having time to read up on Beale. For obvious reasons I didn't want to research any Air Force bases from my home a few hours before the UAV's attack on our home and the Guardian Angel's subsequent retaliation attacks on those bases. I'd have to do the extra research this evening. I didn't know enough about the Guardian Angel's targets after Beale AFB, so I stopped at a conveniently accessible computer near Beale to google for the list of American Air Force bases, researching those that were nearest to Corvallis.

I was pretty sure the news of the attack on our house would get on the air quickly. Paul was told to do so and there were too many camera crews in Corvallis with little to do and with live transmission capabilities. I wanted to make sure my attack occurred after the public knew about the attack on our home so they wouldn't get confused over which one was retaliation for the other. I wanted that to be very clear because an inexplicably large proportion of the public are Christians so aren't equipped to think logically. I did my usual trick of turning on the TV in an empty house, and turning the volume up loud enough for me to hear it from outside a window.

I didn't need the volume because I immediately recognized the pictures of Mom and Dad's devastated bedroom. It was still fun to listen to the commentary though, as everyone was SHOCKED AND HORRIFIED that the Air Force would 'allegedly' do such a thing. The "allegedly" was pronounced almost with sneers, as the evidence Paul was presenting with the Chief of Police's corroboration was damning. There were enough pieces of the UAV lying around to match it with our photos, proving the legitimacy of the photos. A quick internet search of the model Paul named showed pictures of it, and those were recognizably the same as the wreckage's larger pieces and our telescope photos. Only one of that model had ever been sold, recently to the USAF. Even more suspicious was that the UAV-oriented internet sites clearly described the one that attacked our home as a stealth development. There was absolutely no need for a stealth UAV to be flown in American airspace at all! Whose radar were they trying to hide it from? The obvious answer to that question being: The Andersons'. Everyone believed that the Air Force had been behind the attack, despite the "allegedlies".

The Army had been duped into attacking the Andersons by the CIA, which made an attack by another of our armed forces easily believable. Shocking and unbelievable, but in a head-shakingly believable way. The commentators weren't asking "Did the Air Force do it?" but, "Who duped the Air Force or did they do it themselves?" Occasionally a commentator would remember to tack on a sneered "allegedly".

A few minutes later I had my itinerary planned and it was time to get the ball rolling.

I arrived at Beale AFB a couple of minutes into Wednesday, ready to get the Air Force's day off to a bad start.

The land around the base was flat and empty, making it easy for me to approach. It would've been almost impossible to sneak up on during daylight, but at night I could drop out of the sky almost wherever I wanted. The area of Beale that I wanted to fuck over was a north-south rectangle about 6,000 feet long and 1,500 feet wide. The runway itself, which wasn't included in my target area, was 2,000 feet farther to the west. I was targeting the main service buildings - control tower, hangars, maintenance workshops, offices, the UAV operations buildings, etc. - and the parking apron immediately to the buildings' west. The area contained about two dozen buildings and quite a few aircraft parked in the open, such as half a dozen U-2 reconnaissance planes, several smaller planes, including a few UAVs and several large planes parked at the northern end.

It was far too large for me to take care of from one hidden location so I'd have to move along it. I didn't want my physical body to be seen - only the Guardian Angel - so I couldn't be at ground level, especially because my running zigzags down the middle of a 1,500 feet wide, well-lit, busy area would get me shot. That meant my physical body had to be up in the air. That'd work fine, as I knew that if I flew at an altitude of two hundred feet no one would see me at night. I'd be far enough to the side of the runway that its upward pointing lights wouldn't illuminate me, I was wearing black and I'd be flying standing upright. I'd also be arranging for some massive distractions down at ground level.

My next target after Beale was a couple of hundred miles north, so I started at the southern end of Beale to attack it in a south-to-north direction to make for an easy departure afterward, not that it would matter much which direction I did this in.

I was at two hundred feet AGL about a thousand feet south of my target area and heading rapidly north, slowing down as I got closer. I created the Guardian Angel at six feet AGL, starting with it as the size of a pea, expanding it to its normal size as it reached the target area, making it considerably brighter than normal to be more distracting and better at ruining people's night-vision. It was lined up on the eastern edge of the apron, so it'd pass immediately in front of the doors and windows of the buildings, except those which were recessed east of the apron.

The first building coming up was a column of six long, thin hangars. As soon as I was within four hundred feet of the first one, I used a sight blob to look inside for people. Seeing none, I ripped the roof off, tilted it, and smashed it down into the hopefully very expensive plane inside the hangar, and then I set fire to the mess. I traced the overhead sprinklers' pipe back to where it entered the hangar, and ripped it apart. Total time about ten seconds. I slowed down to about 20 feet per second (15 miles per hour; 22 kilometers per hour), slightly slower than I needed for the 250-foot long hangar but there were other buildings coming up on my right which also needed demolishing. The Guardian Angel was just a light blob, leaving me two invisible sight blobs to operate with, so I could destroy two buildings at a time without slowing down any more.

The control tower was the next on the list. I looked inside and there were several people working, most of whom were staring out at the Guardian Angel and what I'd just finished doing to the first hangar. For the visual effect, I zoomed the Guardian Angel straight at them. It covered the four hundred feet in about a tenth of a second (the equivalent of 1,200 mph), then braked to an instant halt in the middle of the control room. Angels have good brakes, even better than the brakes that car salesmen rave about. I stomped six major pieces of electronics with a ton of pressure each, instantly squashing them flat. Then another six items, then another six, and that was about it. I grabbed the recoiling guys, pushed the roof off and dumped it on the empty land to the tower's west. I lifted everyone out, lowering them quickly but non-injuriously on the ground to the east, several dozen feet away from the tower.

The tower had several exposed support legs that didn't look individually strong, and a quick maximum-force push against the western leg bent it out of position. I repeated that in the same direction on two other legs and then pushed the Leaning Tower of Beale over. I quite enjoyed watching it crash to the ground, and regretted I didn't have time to stop for a celebratory pizza. Meanwhile I'd noticed some Air Force cars in the parking lot beside the tower, so I picked those up, smashed their fuel tanks open, and literally threw them into the burning hangar. Non-Air Force cars I left alone.

The other sight blob was providing the visual guidance for my fucking over the next hangar in the column of six. It didn't contain a plane, so I just trashed it quickly and set a fire where I thought it might do the most good (or bad; depending on whose side of the war you're on: God's or America's). The fire would probably go out, but there was a U-2 parked on the runway not far ahead which I'd drop into the empty hangar soon.

The third hangar and a large office were the next two buildings to be simultaneously processed. Again ripping off the roofs, smashing them into the building, setting fires and ruining the sprinkler system. About two hundred NP-fingertips can empty a LOT of filing cabinets very quickly, as well as smashing holes in several internal walls so it's easier for them to catch fire. A couple dozen max-effect heat blobs scattered around the room set fire to everything they touched in seconds.

The parked U-2 got cut into quarters and dumped into the second and third hangars to encourage their fires. According to Wikipedia, the empty weight of a U-2 is 6,760 kg, about 90% of my current maximum lifting force. If it had fuel in it (hopefully) then it'd be even heavier. Even if empty, 90% of my maximum force was too heavy because it'd take me too long to move it, so it got sliced first. That was MUCH quicker.

A couple of fuel storage tanks were next and very easily ruptured and ignited when I was safely NOT above them! To my surprise, they didn't explode the way I thought they would, but they did burn well. [[Too much of my education had been provided by Hollywood. A storage tank full of fuel can't explode in the spectacular manner movies inevitably portray, as fuel needs oxygen to burn. The fuel leaking out of the ruptures burned really well though.]]

Two more small buildings and the rest of the initial column of six hangars were quickly dealt with. Two of the hangars had people in them, but pulling them out could be done while I was raising the roof, so it barely slowed me down at all. I placed them on the ground several dozen yards to the west, on the parking apron. Most of the hangars contained planes, which pleased me. I reached another externally parked U-2, and a nearby small, two-engine prop plane of an unknown model. Both of them got tossed into destroyed hangars.

When I finished working on the sixth hangar, I was in range of the UAV operations area. It was a complex of six buildings, four quite small, one large, and one even larger at about 300 x 300 feet. There were something like a hundred cars parked around the buildings. I slowed myself and allocated both sight blobs to working on this complex. The roofs of the two big buildings were too big for me to lift in their entirety, so I'd have to process these buildings differently than the earlier ones. I started with the biggest building. I flew the Guardian Angel (operating as a sight blob now, that change taking only a thought to put into effect) into the building, passing ghost-like through the wall into an open area in the building, freaking out everyone who saw it. There weren't that many observers though, as the building was divided into dozens of private operating areas and offices.

There was an empty field immediately to the west, so a large chunk of the west wall exploded outward. One sight blob watched the outside area so I'd be able to see where to put the people, while the other sight blob (the Guardian Angel) enabled me to grab everyone in the room and fly them out through the missing wall. As soon as they were in the external sight blob's field of vision, the Guardian Angel went searching through the building. After entering each room, it pushed the wall out in the direction it'd come in. That kept everyone in the room safe, would make it easier for the fire to spread later, and gave me a path to evacuate people through. After any people were ejected, the contents of each room were destroyed if they were electronics, or emptied if they were paper files.

It took a couple of minutes to get everybody out of the building, which is a very long time considering I had two sight blobs that could move with an infinite speed and hundreds of NP-fingertips. By then people were screaming (the office ladies mostly), and panicking (pretty much everyone, as the Guardian Angel is freaky, walls were inexplicably bursting apart, people were being grabbed and flown through the air, etc.). Some of the people I'd carried outside tried to run back in; I guess because it's illegal for the Air Force to refuse to employ Christians. Considering their intelligence, I responded by knocking them out.

I heard sirens and looked to see two fire trucks rushing down the apron toward the burning hangars. The first fire had started three minutes ago so the fire teams' response had been slower than I'd expected. They took a few more seconds to get close enough to me, at which time I created a second Guardian Angel in front of the trucks, picked them up, turned them upside-down and put them back down again, taking a moment to push down very forcefully on the rear axle of each until the back of the truck collapsed, presumably ruining most of their functionality. I only crushed the rear because there were guys struggling to get out of the cab.

I canceled all the NP-fingertips I'd used to pancake the back of the fire trucks, recreating them as heat blobs throughout the main UAV operations building to set a dozen fires throughout it. The new Guardian Angel zoomed back into the building and went searching for the main sprinkler system pipe, which I wrecked as usual.

The Guardian Angels - now both functioning as sight blobs (actually radio blobs, although the radar systems had stopped radiating when I'd destroyed the control tower) - zoomed into the second largest building, repeating the process of the first, the only difference being that the building was half the size, less partitioned, and I ejected people to the east. It took less than a minute. Total attack time four minutes so far.

Over a dozen UAVs somewhere in the world just lost all their guidance. I'd like to think that they'd fly until they ran out of fuel and then crash in remote areas of the world. Unfortunately, I suspected that almost certainly wouldn't happen as it'd be too easy for other USAF controllers to reestablish contact and order the planes to land, especially because some of the UAVs probably had over thirty hours of fuel left.

While one Guardian Angel was destroying the smaller buildings in the operations area, the other Guardian Angel was picking up Air Force cars, puncturing their fuel tanks, and throwing them into one of the already cleared and burning buildings.

The next seven hundred feet was a couple of parking lots and some trees, so of no interest to me. To its west were four comparatively small hangars in the middle of the parking apron; presumably for top-secret planes. I zigged my body that way to get within range, while the two Guardian Angels caught up with me at ground level, merging in front of dozens of witnesses. Actually, the merge happened behind most of the witnesses, as they were scattering in panic at the Guardian Angels' heading their way (this was the group I'd ejected from the big building). Some of them were Air Force guards, were armed, and took panicky shots at the angels. It had no effect on the angels of course, but two of their panicky overshots hit people. As soon as I heard the gunfire, the Guardian Angels climbed several feet so any future gunfire would be aimed too high to hurt anyone. I very much wanted to have a war in which no one died.

Two of the small, isolated hangars did have interesting looking UAVs in them, but not for long. A nearby U-2 helped the fires nicely as its fuel burnt REALLY well. The people were ejected, as usual.

I zagged back east, toward a 400-foot wide tongue of the tarmac that extended eight hundred feet east of the apron, surrounded by UAV servicing and maintenance buildings. I did the southern buildings first, throwing any Air Force cars into already burning buildings. The firehouse was in this area too: another truck came charging out of its garage and got all of ten feet clear before it shared the fate of its predecessors. I wrecked the rest of the fire trucks before they could be started. There were quite a few planes parked in this area, so the buildings were soon burning very nicely.

Looking back, I could see that nearly all the buildings behind me were burning very well too. A couple of hangars were disappointing, but the large buildings were making up for it by blazing very enthusiastically. Wary of all the extra light from the fires, I raised my body a hundred feet higher to make my being spotted less likely, at the cost of reducing my ground-level horizontal reach somewhat.

The next area was a very large administration area. It was mostly empty, and a few seconds later, was entirely empty, wrecked, catching fire very well, and containing eight U-2 quarters. There was a large parking lot to the admin building's east, but it was mostly empty so only a handful of Air Force cars got tossed into that fire.

I heard the sound of cars and moved a Guardian Angel to look. Several cars were speeding north up the apron. As soon as they saw the angel come their way, rifle fire erupted from the cars' windows. I didn't want to leave trigger happy riflemen behind me in case one of them noticed something black occluding the stars. The riflemen's night-vision would be ruined from looking at all the fires, but I'd rather play safe, and I could play playfully too.

I ZOOMED the light blob toward them, having it split into two, four, then eight Guardian Angels. They zoomed around the cars, causing chaos as the drivers slammed on the brakes and/or turned sharply. There would certainly have been accidents, probably bad ones as I doubted the occupants were wearing their seatbelts, but I saved them by grabbing hold of each car and lifting them a few feet into the air, decelerating them as I turned them over. I pulled the rifles and pistols out of everyone's hands. I could've demonstrated to them that bullets don't harm Guardian Angel's, but I was sure there'd be ample proof of that before this night was over, so I simply tossed the weapons a long way away and lowered the cars back to the tarmac on their roofs.

I resumed going north. About half a mile ahead was a large airplane parking area built off the north end of the runway. It had a couple of decent-sized buildings and five of those big KC-135 in-flight refueling planes, hopefully containing a lot of fuel.

I took out the two buildings simultaneously in the usual way. The KC-135s were certainly way too heavy for me to pick up without chopping them up into a dozen pieces, which I couldn't be bothered doing. I simply punctured up into the underside of both wings of the first plane in multiple places, causing fuel leaks that I ignited. The flames immediately engulfed the plane. Now that I knew where the fuel tanks were, it only took a few seconds to puncture and set fire to the subsequent planes. After the last plane was engulfed, I quickly accelerated north and climbed to get clear of any possible small-arms fire.

Rolling up the whole air base had taken eleven minutes. There was virtually nothing left of the place, and there'd be even less by the time the fires burned down. I'd destroyed every plane, every building - apart from a few minor ones too far off to the side that I couldn't be bothered going after - and every significant piece of electronics.

Eleven minutes had been a bit longer than I would've liked, but it was fast enough that there'd been very little opportunity for people to get organized. There was literally nothing at all they could do about the Guardian Angel(s) directly, other than dropping a very large bomb on one of them that happened to catch me in the blast radius. I thought that was unlikely in eleven minutes. What I did fear more was them getting organized enough to start searching the sky carefully. I'd averaged a speed of about 6 mph along the target area, which wasn't as fast as I would've liked as it left me observable for too long, even with Shock and Awe on my side. I'd try to do better in the future. Hopefully practice would make perfect.

^

Two hundred miles north of Beale AFB is Klamath Falls Airport, also known as Kingsley Field. According to the useful Wikipedia, it's mostly used by general aviation (like Vanessa's BBJ), by one commercial airline, and by the Oregon Air National Guard for, among other things, "advanced air to air combat training for F-15 pilots." There was a good chance that advanced F-15 air combat training would need F-15s, which made Klamath Falls my next destination.

Tonight was all about pressuring the Air Force, and the Air National Guard wasn't formally part of the Air Force, but that just made Klamath Falls and even more tempting target. It'd demonstrate that the angel's vengeance wasn't constrained, would cause another organization to yell at the Air Force, and would tell the Air Force that the Guard wouldn't be able to backstop them.

It took half an hour to get there. I flew low, at 200 feet, low enough to dive to the deck quickly if a radar near me started operating in one of the flesh-detecting bands, but the trip was uneventful. As best as I could tell, there'd been no reaction to my attack on Beale AFB. I hoped I'd carry on seeing no reaction, but I somehow doubted it.

The Wikipedia entry for the airfield identified three hangars as being used by the Air National Guard, so I checked them out. The first two I came to were close together, and both contained F-15s. The hangars were near other buildings that were owned by non-Government organizations, which had yet more neighbors close beside them. I didn't want to burn the whole block down, so I'd do things a little differently this time.

I dropped a Guardian Angel into the middle of each hangar and immediately started turning F-15s into F-15 pieces. The sight and noise caused people to rush to investigate. I held them away while I made a pile of F-15 pieces in the middle of each hangar, and then set fire to them.

I didn't have to wait for the fire to take hold, because it WHOOSHED. I left the sprinkler system intact and released the people to do whatever they wanted, including fire fighting. I watched long enough to make sure none of them did something crazy, then I moved to the third Air Force hangar at the north of the airfield.

It was larger, stood apart from any neighbors, and had a munitions area. The people were running around frantically, presumably reacting to an alarm from the other hangars. The Guardian Angel flew through the wall ghost-like, picked everybody up while a large part of the roof was pulled off. The people were evacuated, and the building and all its contents suffered the same fate as the Beale buildings, just without the car tossing.

Reducing the Guard's small presence in Klamath Falls had taken less than five minutes.

^

Two hundred miles east of Klamath Falls is Mountain Home AFB. Every leg of my journey tonight was about two hundred miles because that's how far apart Air Force bases seem to be placed in this area of the country, for no reason that I can imagine. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

The Wikipedia article about Mountain Home AFB had said that it is the home to two F-15E Strike Eagle and one F-15C Eagle fighter squadrons. The F-15Es are about 50% more expensive than the Cs, but although I wanted to hurt the Air Force financially, I was not glad that there were two squadrons of Es because - according to Wikipedia again - Es have VERY good infrared sensors, including an infrared targeting system. Speaking as someone who radiates infrared, that wasn't welcome news.

My building damage was going to be curtailed at this base too, because Google Earth had shown the base's key buildings to be spread out too much, with residential housing and other unsuitable buildings intermingled with some of the worthwhile targets. I wasn't going to risk destroying residential homes. To play safe I wouldn't even destroy the buildings two rows back from the apron; I'd restrict myself to destroying the tower and only the buildings immediately beside the apron. Those were the highest value and most important ones anyway.

As I neared the base, I detected a hive of activity. There were six planes aloft, flying around the base with their radars on. The radars were in a band that is excellent for picking up other aircraft or missiles but no good for picking up me, so the radars didn't worry me, but visual sighting using infrared did. Having half a dozen F-15s gunning for my ass would definitely count as bad news, especially if they were Es. Even Cs could cause me grief if I created fires and flew over them, as the fliers could get a glimpse of me, alert the rest of their flight, and they could all come after my ass.

On the other hand, it'd be very good for the Air Force to see the Guardian Angel emerge unscathed from everything half a dozen F-15s could throw at it. That was worth thinking about. I had no problem with the Air Force throwing high-speed high-explosive things at the Guardian Angel. It was their throwing those things at me that I was highly motivated to avoid.

If the planes above me were Es they could pick me up on infrared if I got closer. Wikipedia said their infrared system could be displayed on their Heads Up Display, " ... effectively giving them daylight visibility at night time." My flying around in "effectively daylight" would be far too dangerous. So I backed off and went in search of some items.

Despite Wikipedia's comment, I knew enough about how infrared vision systems worked to know they did not turn nighttime into daytime. If I wrapped my body in tinfoil and took to the air, they wouldn't see me until my internal heat penetrated the tinfoil, which would take quite a while. Not that I'm going to do that, as I'd show up on radar BRILLIANTLY. I'm just explaining how their infrared system worked.

I searched quickly through the houses under me, several miles away from the base, until I was able to steal a full-head crash helmet and a large, dark-colored sheet, then I headed back to the Mountain View AFB. I had the sheet over my head as an umbrella and was holding the helmet ready to put it on when I got closer, to minimize the time it would be heated up by my head. A couple of months ago, as part of getting radio blobs going, I'd seen that my head and limbs didn't give out as much heat as other people's. For a few days I'd used heat blobs to correct that, but my body had adapted and now radiated the usual amount of heat. It was subconscious though, so I couldn't dial my body's heat output to zero, which would probably be very unhealthy anyway. People radiate a lot of heat from their heads and I would be flying upright so any planes looking down would see my head clearly. My wearing a helmet would block that, plus it'd obscure the top-down view of the heat radiating from the rest of my body. Perhaps my already using the large, dark sheet as an umbrella made the helmet unnecessary, but all things considered, it seemed better to err on the side of caution.

The radar beam sources told me that the planes flying overhead were flying in pairs: two of them at about 2,000 feet, two at what I guessed was about 10,000 feet, and two much higher, at something like 50,000 ft. They were flying circuits, which made keeping track of them easier. I could differentiate between F-15Cs and Es easier from above, so I put the helmet on, made sure the mind controlling the sheet's position was paying attention, then raised myself to 3,000 feet and moved close enough to see to see the lowest pair of patrolling planes.

Unlike the F-15E's infrared system, a max-sized radio blob did effectively give me daylight vision - the absence of shadows not being an issue at 3,000 feet - allowing me to clearly see that the planes had a crew of two, so they were Es - bugger! (Cs have a crew of one.) I'd have to be very careful with Es above me. I backed off and descended, thinking about what to do. I even landed in a deserted area and took off my helmet to let it cool down. [[Crash helmets are actually very good thermal insulators, so my worrying about it heating up enough to radiate was unnecessary.]]

When I'd been high, I'd also seen that the base itself was a hive of activity, with many planes being made ready to take off, so this wasn't going to happen the same way as my attack on Beale had.

I'd lost the element of surprise so Mountain Home AFB was now alert and had fighters patrolling, but I had a helmet and a dark sheet so I wasn't too worried. With those covering me, I doubted if any of my heat radiated upward. Maybe, at most, a faint smudge of heat, far less than a human normally does and with a non-human shape. The Weapon Systems Officers of the planes above me would presumably be looking for signs more significant than a faint smudge. Provided I stood upright so most of my heat radiated horizontally, and I kept the sheet between me and the overhead planes, then I should be fine. It was time for me to think about how to attack this base.