Chapter 6 - Ghost of Groom Lake
Deep beneath the surface of Nellis Air Force Base, inside the windowless, reinforced command bunker of the 57th Wing, Brigadier General Thomas Vance was standing over the primary tactical display.
The room was filled with the low hum of cooling fans and the rhythmic chatter of fifty radar operators.
“Say that again, Havoc Lead,” Vance snapped, leaning over the master communications console, his knuckles white against the desk. “Who did she say she was?”
*“General, she gave the call sign Widow 6,”* Major Cole’s voice crackled through the secure speaker system. *“She’s in the left seat of the Trans-Con 767. I’ve got visual confirmation through the canopy. It’s an elderly female. Silver hair. No flight suit. But she’s holding trim on a split-flap configuration at two hundred and ten knots like she’s parked on the tarmac.”*
General Vance went completely still.
The color drained from his weathered, fifty-five-year-old face. The room around him seemed to lose all sound.
“General?” the young communications lieutenant asked hesitantly. “Should we notify the Department of Homeland Security? We have standard protocols for unauthorized commercial diversions into military airspace—”
“Shut up, Lieutenant,” Vance whispered.
“Sir?”
“I said shut your damn mouth!” Vance barked, spinning on his heel. His eyes swept across the room with terrifying intensity. “Pull up the legacy personnel archives. Red-tier clearance. Project Have Blue and the Senior Trend test groups. 1978 through 1986.”
The intelligence officer’s fingers flew across his keyboard. “General, those records are still classified under the fifty-year executive order. I need a presidential override to decrypt—”
“Use my commander’s token!” Vance slammed a plastic keycard onto the terminal desk. “Override authorization: Sierra-Victor-Nine-Zero-Zero-Alpha! Do it now!”
The computer screen flickered through lines of green cascading text. A red padlock icon on the display dissolved, replaced by a grainy, black-and-white scanned photograph from 1981.
The photograph showed a thirty-two-year-old woman standing in front of the jagged, faceted black nose of the YF-117 prototype out at Area 51. She was wearing an olive-drab flight suit covered in patches that didn't officially exist. Her silver-flecked brown hair was tied back in a bandana. She was leaning against the landing gear, laughing with a group of legendary Skunk Works engineers who had all been buried in Arlington decades ago.
Her name was listed on the redacted dossier:
*SANDERS, PAULINE M.*
*RANK: LIEUTENANT COLONEL, USAF (COVERT/RETIRED)*
*CALL SIGN: WIDOW 6*
*RECORD: 4,200 FLIGHT TEST HOURS. FIRST FEMALE PILOT TO BREAK MACH 2 IN AN EXPERIMENTAL AIRFRAME. AWARDED THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS (CLASSIFIED/NON-DISCLOSED).*
Beneath her service record was a single sentence handwritten in faded blue ink by the legendary aeronautical designer Kelly Johnson:
*“If you give this woman two wings and a burning match, she will fly it back to the barn.”*
Vance touched the screen with a trembling finger.
“My God,” he murmured, his voice thick with an emotion that shocked every young airman in the room. “She’s alive.”
“General?” the lieutenant asked, his eyes wide. “Who is she?”
“Thirty-four years ago, my father was flying a chase plane over the Tonopah Test Range,” Vance said quietly, never taking his eyes off the screen. “His fuel line ruptured at fifty thousand feet. He was in an inverted flat spin. Every manual in the Air Force said eject. But there was a civilian town directly beneath him. Widow 6 was on his wing. She talked him through an un-powered flameout recovery step by step. She stayed with him all the way down to two hundred feet, refusing to leave him until he touched down safely on a dry lake bed.”
Vance swallowed hard, blinking back a sudden prickle of heat behind his eyelids.
“She never got a parade,” Vance whispered. “She never got her name in the newspapers. The planes she flew didn't exist. When she retired, she just walked out into the desert and disappeared into ordinary life.”
The general grabbed the master microphone, his voice thundering through the command center speakers and blasting directly out over the secure tactical channel to every unit at Nellis.
“All units, this is Wing Commander Vance,” he roared. “We have an emergency diverted aircraft inbound: Trans-Con 842. Widow 6 is in the cockpit. I want Runway two-one left scrubbed. Roll every crash-fire-rescue truck we have! Clear the overrun! Move the alert birds off the taxiway! If that woman needs half the runway, give her the whole damn base!”
He clicked over to the guard frequency, his voice softening into something approaching reverence.
“Widow 6, this is Nellis Command. General Vance on the net. The field is yours, ma’am. Bring her home.”
Up in the roaring, vibrating cockpit of Flight 842, Pauline heard the general’s voice through her foam earcups.
A tiny, razor-thin smile touched the corners of her wrinkled lips.
May you like
“Nellis Command, Widow 6,” she answered softly. “Tell your crash crews to stay behind the foam line. I’m going to need every inch of that concrete.”
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