North Cape

On the day the aircraft was rolled out, shrouded in nylon and airlifted to Edwards Air Force Base, there was no celebration, no rejoicing over a job well done, only relief that it was at last out of the plant and gone. A Lockheed C-141 flew the parts of the aircraft to the desert flight-testing base at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and it was quickly rolled Into a hangar and disassembled, then trucked deeper into the Mohave to' Gillon Advanced Test Site on the northern rim of the desert. Here, in a specially constructed and closely guarded base annex; the aircraft was reassembled and the testing begun. Teleman's first look at the aircraft came on a day three years after he had signed his contract with the CIA and entered training. Previously, he had served as a reconnaissance pilot with the U. S. Air Force during the Vietnamese war, with some eighty-three missions to his credit before the armistice. He was a bachelor, with no more than the usual family ties and a fierce devotion to his country that had been tested and found fully complete in a North Vietnamese prison camp. His three years of training, covering a range of subjects from aeronautical engineering to geopolitics, and including education equivalent to a masters degree in the psychology of political power and government structures, had taught him more than he had ever suspected there was to learn. Teleman stood in the hangar that August day, feeling the fierce heat of the Mohave sun burning down on his back. It was nothing compared to the white heat of excitement generated by the sleek black needle of an airplane that reached back into the gloom of the hangar.

He shook his head wonderingly as he walked back along its DC-9 length. The body was 120 feet long, yet nowhere was it more than eight feet in diameter. The fuselage carried the distinctive contours of a supersonic aircraft: a pinched waist, Coke bottle shape halfway along its length. The wing began less than ten feet from the tip of the nose. Starting at a width of half an inch, it grew to two feet at mid-length, where it then flared out into a severely flattened and cambered parallelogram. Twin vertical stabilizers rode the wing, reaching four stories toward the ceiling of the cantilevered hangar. Each was demurely painted with the symbol of the United States, a six-by-nine-foot representation of the American flag. Other than that red, white, and blue flag, the aircraft was a gleaming black, a deadly killer whale of an aircraft for all that she was completely unarmed.

Teleman climbed the ladder affixed to the fragile side, half expecting the fuselage to collapse under his weight. He wriggled down into the cockpit and stretched out in the same acceleration couch he had sat in so many times in the mock-up at Eglin AFB. Every instrument, every control was exactly where it should be. With eyes closed he ran through the complete check-out of the instrument and computer panels. The only difference that he could detect was the complete satisfaction of sitting in the actual aircraft rather than the fiberglass and plywood mock-up.

Teleman was the first to fly the A-17. She was rolled out the next day and he climbed into the cockpit again and wriggled down into the couch, feeling the soft push of the oilfilled cushions against his back as the couch adjusted itself to his body. He made the first flight without the PCMS — the Physiological Control Monitoring System — in operation and the aircraft was all his to control. Teleman taxied to the far end of the runway and set the brakes. Then he ran the engines up slowly to full-military-rated thrust. The two great Pratt & Whitney TRR-5e turbo-ram-rocket engines took two minutes to build thrust to the maximum allowable for takeoff, nearly 53,000 pounds apiece. Teleman lay in the acceleration couch wondering at the tremendous vibration that shook every rivet, every seam in the entire aircraft until his teeth ached. Then he released the brakes. And in spite of its two-hundred-thousandpound dead weight, the A-17 bounded forward. He was off the runway before he realized it. Automatically his body went through all the motions: gear up and locked, engines throttled back to low cruising speed of 47o knots, ground control tuned to 126.6 Mc, eyes sweeping the instrument panels. All instruments were reading into the green, and for a moment he ignored the check list and concentrated on getting the feel of the aircraft.

While the chase planes took up their stations around him, he tentatively tried the control system and whistled excitedly as the A-17 responded with all the firmness of an F-4

Phantom. Then test control was on the radio demanding to know if he had started through the check list yet. Regretfully he dropped back into the proper pattern while his two chase pilots, one on either side, grinned at each other from their stations well back and below his tail assembly.