At that, the Black Hawk suddenly accelerated and did a steep right turn, passing in front of the Cessna not more than one hundred feet away, its rotor disk filling the Cessna’s windscreen. The startled pilot cried out and yanked the control yoke back and to the left, then had to fight to regain control as the little airplane almost stalled. They could hear the helicopter’s rotor beats thumping against the Cessna’s fuselage as it circled around them.
The Black Hawk appeared off his left wing seconds later, closer this time, the beat of the rotor blades now thunderous, as if a giant invisible fist were beating on the side of their little airplane. “N-3437T, reverse course immediately! This is an order! Comply immediately!”
“Is that dude crazy, man?” the pilot said. “I nearly crapped my pants!”
“I see it! I see it, I see the antenna!” the right-seater said. “A little to the right, on the horizon! Big round sucker!”
The pilot followed his passenger’s pointing finger. “I don’t see nothin’, man, I don’t— Wait, I got it, I got it,” he said. “That big round thing in the desert? I’ll head over to it.” He put the little Cessna into a steep right bank . . .
. . . and as soon as he did so, the Black Hawk helicopter made a steep left turn, blasting the Cessna with its powerful rotor wash. The action flipped the Cessna completely upside down. It entered an inverted flat spin and crashed into the New Mexico desert seconds later.
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
A FEW HOURS LATER
“Congratulations, Jung-bae, on a successful test of Starfire,” Dr. Toshuniko “Toby” Nukaga, professor of aerospace engineering at Cal Poly, said via a video teleconference hookup on his laptop computer from his room at an upscale hotel in Seattle, Washington. “I just heard the news. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there, but I am chairing a conference up in Seattle.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jerry said. He was in a trailer about a mile from the Starfire rectenna site in the White Sands Missile Test Range northwest of Alamogordo, New Mexico, surrounded by laptop computers used to monitor the power and steering systems aboard Armstrong Space Station. Seven team members were with him, high-fiving one another as they began analyzing the mountain of data they had received. “I am sorry you could not be here as well, sir. You were the driving force behind this project from the very beginning.”
“The credit belongs to you and the others on the project team, Jung-bae—I was only the facilitator. So, how much energy did you transfer?”
“One-point-four-seven megawatts, sir.”
“Outstanding! Well done!”
“It had to be cut short because an unauthorized aircraft entered the range.”
“I had heard that some protesters were going to try to disrupt the test by flying a private plane over the rectenna,” Nukaga said.
Jerry blinked in surprise. “You did, sir?” he asked incredulously.
“Jung-bae, I’m here in Seattle at the annual conference of the International Confederation of Responsible Scientists,” Nukaga said. “There are over a hundred groups represented here of scientists, politicians, environmentalists, and industry leaders from all over the world—we even have the presidential candidate, former secretary of state Stacy Anne Barbeau, here to give the keynote later today.
“We also have a few rather radical groups here too, and one of them, Students for Universal Peace, approached me to complain that Cal Poly was involved in a weapons development program with Starfire,” Nukaga went on. “I assured them we were not, but they insisted. They said it was their duty to do anything they could to stop the Starfire test firing, even if it put their lives in jeopardy—I actually think they were hoping someone would get shot down by the maser just to prove it really was a weapon.”
“That is unbelievable, sir,” Jerry said. “Why did you not tell us about this?”
“I only half believed it myself, Jung-bae,” Nukaga said. “Frankly, the kids that confronted me looked like they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from, let alone having the wherewithal to hire a plane to fly over a government restricted area hoping to get shot down by a maser beam from space. So.” Nukaga was obviously anxious to change the subject. “Mr. McLanahan and Miss Huggins looked good aboard the military space station. I saw one of their press conferences last night. Are they doing well?”
“Very well, sir.”
“Good. Any problems? Any difficulties with the equipment or software?” Jerry hesitated and averted his eyes from his camera for a brief moment, and Nukaga noticed it right away. “Jung-bae?”
Jerry wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be talking about anything having to do with Starfire and the space station on an unsecure network—the team leaders had decided to discuss among themselves what got released and what didn’t—but Nukaga was one of their professors and an early but somewhat reluctant supporter of the project. “There was a potential problem with the relay I designed that allowed power to flow from the lithium-ion capacitors to the microwave generator, sir,” he said finally.
“A ‘potential’ problem?”