Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

In 1950, the CIA and the Air Force decided to tackle the problem of how to quickly retrieve personnel who were deep in enemy territory, well beyond the range of the helicopters of the day and in areas that were too unsafe for a plane to land. The ultimate product of that endeavor was the Fulton surface-to-air-recovery-system—STARS—named for inventor Robert Fulton Jr. who had spent nearly a decade designing and refining the system. It was known more commonly by the nickname ‘Skyhook.’


Subsequent advances in aircraft design and stealth technology, as well as improvements to air-tracking radar systems employed by unfriendly nations, had rendered the Skyhook system effectively obsolete; there were much better ways to rescue downed pilots and deep-cover agents, much safer and much more pleasant ways.

The principle behind Fulton’s system was fairly simple. A transport aircraft would make a foray into enemy territory and airdrop a package containing all the necessary equipment: a harness, five hundred feet of high-tension rope, and a self-inflating balloon. The man on the ground would don the harness, connect himself to the balloon and then send it aloft. The whole process could be accomplished in just a few minutes. Once the balloon was in the sky, the plane would make one more pass, driving straight at the balloon. A special trap attached to the nose of the aircraft would snag the rope and yank the man into the sky.

That was where the really uncomfortable part began. The first thing the person in the harness would experience was sudden rapid acceleration—zero to two hundred miles an hour in the blink of an eye. The elasticity of the rope alleviated some of this effect, but the G-forces involved were enough to make some people black out. Next, came the high-altitude double whammy: freezing temperatures and low air pressure. While the plane beat a hasty retreat back to friendly skies, the unlucky CIA asset would experience the equivalent of climbing an Alpine mountain in the space of a few seconds. Last but not least, there was the spinning; an object trailed at high speed through the air had a tendency to spin like an out-of-control kite. This spin could induce dizziness, nausea or even unconsciousness. Fortunately, there was an easy way to stop the spin: the disoriented man dangling at the end of the rope needed only to extend his half-frozen arms and legs, spread-eagling like a body-surfer, until the air crew in the plane managed to reel in their catch.

Capture and torture by the enemy was almost a preferable alternative.

Officially, the Air Force ceased using the Skyhook in 1996. Unofficially, the equipment and the capability to employ the Skyhook was maintained by the Joint Special Operations Command as a ‘just in case’ measure.

No one had been especially thrilled by King’s suggestion that they use the Skyhook to whisk them out of Iran, least of all King himself, but with time and resources in short supply for the team, and with secrecy a paramount concern, Deep Blue had signed off on it. There was the matter of retrofitting Senior Citizen to accommodate the thirty-foot long horns that would be used to snare the balloon—no simple task since the craft was designed for super-sonic travel. There was also the question of whether the pick-up line could hold the weight of six passengers; it was theoretically possible, but the system had never been used to pick up more than two men at a time.

What was most certainly not in the original plan was deploying the STARS from inside a moving vehicle while being chased down a rural highway by half the Iranian National Police force.

In a rare instance of serendipity, the forward momentum of the Toyota actually made things easier. Like with a kite pulled along by a running child, the line pulled taut, and the balloon—which was festooned with blinking infrared lights—cut through the sky in an almost perfectly straight line, providing an easy target for the pilot sitting at the controls of Senior Citizen.

Unseen by anyone on the ground, the stealth plane came from out of the west and streaked across the sky. Even without the constantly updated GPS coordinates supplied by the mysterious entity known only as Deep Blue, the pilot would have been able to find the target vehicle simply by following the string of flashing red and blue lights trailing behind it.

The pilot banked the aircraft to the right, carved a tight turn in the sky and with his computerized targeting system, locked onto the balloon. The plane advanced unerringly toward the blinking lights, and then, with textbook precision, it snared the balloon in the V-shaped trap.

One at a time, like an unraveling chain-stitch, the six passengers in the SUV were plucked from their seats. The empty vehicle cruised forward a few hundred yards before veering off the road and crashing into a stand of trees. By the time the police cars arrived, the plane, still trailing the Chess Team plus one, was already several miles away.