ETF Saga Stories Presents:

Knight of the Dragon

Part One

by:

Brian R. Kupfer

"Morning." Stacy Anrak comments with a yawn and a wave as she walks past Ryan Wakefield in the rec room on her way towards the kitchen. "What’s up?"

"Blowing some Muslim fundamentalist terrorist camps to smithereens" Ryan comments with a gleam in his eye, Aaron’s Spider-Man controller in his hands, his plush Taz-slippered feet propped on the coffee table, his custom-designed F/A-18 rolling and diving on the sixty-inch flat screen plasma TV on the wall in response to Ryan’s inputs on the attached PS2’s controller.

Matt Hunter and Wahren Morast developed an ETF video game that enables the player to be any of the Eagles, and lets them choose from a variety of missions that correspond with any of the team’s vehicles. The duo had sent out copies to all ETF members, most of whom are game junkies anyway, and they can all play over modem lines against one another if at once if they so desired.

Right now, Ryan is re-interpreting the team’s first mission, which he did not participate in, into Lebanon in 1983, opting for an air attack instead of the original ground mission. The game normally would not allow for such a paradox in its gameplay, but Ryan and Aaron Fieldman made a few cheat modifications to the original gaming codes.

"Feel like going for a joy ride?" Ryan comments over his shoulder as the blonde warrior behind him fixes herself breakfast.

"I’m not interested in video games at the moment, Vyper." Stacy replies, with a slight shake of her head.

"That’s good, ‘cause I was thinking about taking Pale Horse out for a shakedown of the newest avionics and powerplant upgrades Bendix and I installed." He tells her, referring to the F-111C he and Matt had liberated from a desert junkyard fate.

"Give me a few minutes to get dressed?" Stacy asks.

After giving her jeans and t-shirt a questioning look, as if to say, what are those, leaves?, Ryan nods his agreement.

As Stacy wanders back past him to her quarters, breakfast bowl in hand, Ryan drops a pair of snakeye munitions from his Hornet, then switches to an outside view to watch them fall off his aircraft’s red, white, and blue wings as they travel their virtual route towards the rendered camp below.

As the camp explodes in a cartoonish fire, Ryan looks down at his sweatpants and Cardinals jersey and decides he should probably dive in the shower before heading to the hangar below to pre-flight the Aardvark.

Ten minutes later, the chrome top and black bottom painted F-111C taxis towards the main hangar’s massive door, the split center-mounted canopy glass lowering into flight positions over the two Eagles in the cockpit.

The early desert morning teems with life. To the untrained ear, all is eerily quiet, but to those few men and women of Doug "Matrix" Danko’s Cavalry, the night is full of sounds.

Rattlesnakes slither their way across the sand, rodents skitter in search of food, raptors float on silent wings, hunting their prey, and the ever present coyote lets out his howl.

One coyote in particular sounds his cry from the far northern edge of a series of crevasses in the desert wilds known as Coyote Canyon, yelling for his packmates, who are crossing the gorge below.

The solitary animal, in military terms, acts as rear guard, and alerts the rest of the pack to coming dangers. He howls into the night as he hears the low grumble of a small truck to the south, away in the distance, warning the pack to be on the lookout. There are many dangerous things in the canyon, after all, that a young coyote can harm itself on.

Five miles to the coyote pack’s south, the truck, a midnight blue Jeep Wrangler, slows to a stop. The driver shuts off the ignition and stands on his seat, looking around for the second vehicle in their little convoy.

Beside and behind the driver, three more forms belonging to Marie "Cleopatra" Cordova, Matt "ElTito" Bendix, and Michaela "Ember" Davis, take to their feet as well, all training night vision goggles to the north, into the pre-dawn semi-darkness, toward the low grumble just coming into their range of detection.

In the Wrangler’s front passenger seat, Marie, a former commander of the ETF, is a raven-haired beauty with a runner’s build, 5’ 10" in height, and is the commander of the Eagles’ Gorilla Mountain Complex, as well as being the beloved of the Cavalry commander.

Behind her, standing in the rear of the Jeep, hanging onto the roll bar, Matt Bendix, "ElTitoBendito", is a 5’11", blue-eyed, sandy haired and goateed former gymnast and USAF bomber pilot, now the Aircraft Commander of the ETF’s pride and joy, the REB-36D Peacemaker II Eagle’s Nest NAWCC multi-task platform, here spending some down time taking Matrix up on an offer to learn how to fly helicopters.

Beside him, Michaela "Ember" Davis, former commander of Ft. Bliss’s HAWTI unit, and Cavalry Mi-24 specialist and pilot, is a five-ten redhead of near-perfect proportions, with mid-back length hair, and always-laughing Caribbean-blue eyes. Many of the men in both the Cavalry and the ETF are smitten with the young woman, who has eyes only for Paul "DaBoyz" Massey, one of the few ETF/Cavalry dual members, who tonight is inside the hidden W.E.C. HQ, acting as the ATC for the special inbound vehicle.

"Okay, Crusher, we’re just inside the outer AA ring if you need a reference point." Doug "Matrix" Danko, the Jeep’s driver, calls over his radio to the second vehicle in their little ground group, somewhere in an offshoot of the canyon ahead of them.

Doug is a former Marine Recon instructor, 5’6" and solid as a fireplug at 200 pounds, sporting a newly-grown goatee that matches the black of his hair, muscle shirt, and cargo pants. He is also the Commander and originator of the Cavalry.

"Reference this......." Mitch "Mavrick" Vannell calls back as Matrix and the other three people in the Jeep hear a low grumbling sound approach from seven feet off the ground, almost directly in front of them.

Suddenly, Mitch snaps on his vehicle’s headlights as he comes to a stop just to the left of them. The big man with the shaved head and dark brown goatee, 6’5" and 250 pounds of former linebacker muscle, grins broadly from his custom-built tan molded leather bucket seat, tilted back at a ten degree angle to allow for his height in the normally low-slung Countach.

"Jesus." Is all Michaela can mutter as she looks up at the underside of a 1988 Lamborghini Countach LP 5000 S quattrovalve, modified into a monster truck with full four-wheel steering and oversized Firestone 866X43X25 flotation tires, which gives the vehicle the ability to propel itself on water. The monster Lamborghini, using tips on gear ratios from Team Bigfoot, can reach speeds up to 90 miles an hour over even terrain on its own, and nearly 225 miles an hour with its onboard nitrous system.

Mitch is extremely proud of his new baby, and drove it down to the Cavalry base from Gorilla Mountain last week to show off to Danko and his crew.

From the passenger’s side of the onyx-black Lamborghini, Carmen "Mikki" Ritter grins back at Mitch, then mutters "boys and their toys," under her breath, which is drowned out by the Countach’s Alpine six-speaker system, playing Linkin’ Park’s "A Place for my Head" from the dashboard-mounted digital CD player.

Carmen is an athletically-shaped brunette, five-nine, and maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. The female warrior, formerly one of the Air Force’s top test pilots, twists to reach over her right shoulder and push the button that acts as the Lamborghini’s door handle, one of the few stock parts in this beast’s cockpit, as Mitch has digitalized everything on the dashboard, added custom speakers, equalizers, seats, and even a HUD to the 5000 S’s interior.

The long door swings forward and upwards on a hydraulic arm, until nearly perpendicular to the supercar’s chassis. Mikki leans down over the Wrangler to confer with the other Eagles below, leaving Mitch to steal the occasional glance at the woman he has come to love.

Off to their north, the lookout coyote once again calls out to his pack, asking to post another sentry so he can cross.

The wild animal stops, suddenly, twitching an ear back and forth as it hears a unique sound from off in the distance. Soon, a human ear will be able to hear the muted whirring sound as well, a unique sound even this close to Wile E. Coyote airbase.

Off to the northwest, from the direction of the White Sands missile range, the sound slowly grows louder and more distinct, and the Eagles and Cavalry members on the canyon floor are able to see a dust cloud being kicked up in the near distance.

"Dig, dig, dig, man, he’s right on us......" Robbie "DoughBoy" Sandler comments calmly to his partner in crime, and driver this morning, Adam "Mayhem" Mason, the other half of the legendary Terror Twins, in the left front bucket seat of the Chevrolet Suburban, racing across the desert towards the Cavalry base.

DoughBoy is the shorter, though more robust of the two men, the blond crewcut topping probably 230 pounds of muscle on his 5’ 11" frame, as compared to his sandy-haired partner’s six-one and 190 pounds. Neither man is to be lightly messed with, however, as various antagonists have learned over the years.
Behind them, in Lil’ Abe’s second row of seats, Wahren "Wolf" Morast and Aaron "Valder" Fieldman check their seatbelts once again as Mayhem roars the Suburban airborne over another clump of scrub vegetation.

"Remind me to stick to aircraft when I do my flying from now on." Morast, the shorter of the two similar-looking sandy-haired men comments.

"Hey, you’re the one who reserved our tickets through the Internet, should’ve known we’d get bargain-basement service." Fieldman quips in reply.

The two, though not related, are often mistaken for one another, as they have similar builds and hairstyles, though Wahren has blue eyes and is two inches shorter at six feet even and thirty pounds heavier at 210 than Aaron, who has green-brown eyes and a gold hoop earring in his left ear, as opposed to Morast’s diamond stud. Both men also wear goatees, and nearly identical tinted sports sunglasses, mirrored for Wolf and blue metallic for Valder.

"Ha ha ha. Somebody shut the peanut gallery back there up." Mason comments over his shoulder as he weaves around a solitary cactus, trying to elude the following vehicle, which has them locked up in its sights, as evidenced by the red dot slewing around the dashboard from their pursuit’s laser-designator.

"Gladly, just pull over and we’ll find somewhere to hide them." Sandler replies.

"You forget, we know where you sleep, DoughBoy, and, more importantly, where you store your Ducati." Fieldman replies, knowing there are very few things in this world DoughBoy cares for more than the Ducati 916 he "found" on a trip to Berlin.

"You wouldn’t dare." Robbie growls.

Uncowed, Aaron just raises an eyebrow at the strong-arm man for the ETF.

The two men lock gazes for a long moment.

"Music, Mayhem, that would be good." Wahren calls to their driver, effectively breaking the stalemate between two of the Eagles’ most stubborn members, and tossing a CD case forward to the driver. Soon enough, Bon Jovi’s "Everyday" from the Bounce release is flooding the Suburban with rock and roll as the large vehicle roars across the desert, trying to eveade their airborne pursuit.

"Doing pretty good, Apache, now show me what you’ve got." Mayhem calls over the radio as he mashes the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

Sitting in the cockpit of the Cavalry’s UH-1C Iroquois, Joe "Apache" Strano grabs the CB-style mike off the Huey’s dashboard.

"Ah, Mayhem, I’m nowhere near you. I’m picking up grub near Alamogordo." The six-foot sandy blond man, 195 pounds with a sprinter’s build and piercing blue eyes, replies, looking out the curved windshield of the assault/transport helicopter at Deanna "Incoming" Waite, Rebecca "Vision" Moore and Shannon "SpiderWoman" Meyers picking up the pizzas, 2-liters of Pepsi and Mt. Dew Code Red from Domino’s Pizza, the parking lot of which the Huey is sitting in.

"Incoming" Waite, an ex-AH-64 pilot, is slightly shorter than Joe at five-ten, though still retaining the slimness of her basketball playing college days, maybe weighing 130 pounds soaking wet. Deanna has shoulder-length brown hair and mischievous auburn eyes.

The next tallest woman on grub call is "Vision", Rebecca Moore, a former college gymnast and FBI Special Agent with clear blue eyes and mid-back length blonde hair, who, at five-seven, still retains her youthful flexibility and enthusiasm.

The last of the group, Shannon "SpiderWoman" Meyers, is also the shortest at 5’3". A professional weightlifter, Meyers, at 155 pounds, has fun challenging many of the men at the base to sparring matches, and the former Delta operative seldom loses.

The three women with him this evening are just one of the reasons Joe Strano loves pizza runs in the old Huey, as he is usually piloting the cutting edge in rotary-wing aviation, the RAH-66A Commanche. That, and getting the choicest selections of the steaming hot pies before anyone else at base has a chance.

"So who the hell is following me?" Adam Mason asks no one in particular as he swerves the big Chevy almost ninety degrees to the left, now actively trying to lose his pursuit.

The undisputedly fastest, and, arguably, most maneuverable, helicopter in the world is crawling along, ten feet off the desert scrub, doing only 95 miles an hour, as compared to its as-yet unchallenged 249 mile an hour top speed.

This helicopter, which can travel backwards at sixty, and track a target sideways nearly as fast, is painted a deep gray, which blends beautifully into the lightening pre-sunrise sky.

Soon, the four men in the Suburban ahead will be able to distinguish the immestakeably British form of the Westland Lynx attack helicopter, the Cavalry’s newest acquisition.

Fittingly, the four-bladed helo is being flown by the Cavalry’s newest flight team, pilot Anastacia "Snow" Velchenko and co-pilot Tatyana "Flame" Fyoderenkov, also known as the Ravens, the two CIS pilots who helped Valder and Wolf survive their long ordeal in the Siberian battlefields.

The Cavalry, originally, placed the two descendants of a long line of Russian women combat aviators, a line that stretches unbroken to the aerial duels of world war two, into the forward recon and combat control role, flying the OH-58D Kiowa aircraft against the AMCF in a few sorties before the peace talks began.

However, the Ravens long to show off their piloting skills in something a little more modern, and, through some cajoling of their Commander, Matrix, a favor is called in to the British SAS, and the Lynx made its way across the Atlantic in the hold of a C-141 Starlifter.

"Tovarich, give up, you are as good as dead." Snow calls over the radio to the fleeing Abe.

"Don’t think so, sweetie, I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve." Adam Mason replies, though he is not TOO sure how many of those tricks will work with no cover presenting itself. "DoughBoy, time to get in the bitch seat." He tells his partner in crime.

"Damnit. I hate that thing. It’s all set up for you and it chafes. Why don’ you make Valder or Wolf jump back there?"

"’Cause we outrank you, that’s why. ‘Cause you dreamed the thing up in the first place, and, most importantly......’cause Mayhem wants to bounce YOU off the walls for once." Wahren comments with a grin.

"Yeah, I do owe ya a few wild rides." Adam agrees as Robbie, with a few choice grumbles under his breath, unhooks his five-point harness and climbs past the two grinning aviators on his way back to the rear of the Suburban.

As he passes them, Aaron Fieldman and Wahren Morast plug a pair of headsets into subdued jacks in the armored vehicle’s ceiling, which tie into the Chevy’s communications suite, allowing the two men to communicate with anyone the Terror Twins are in contact with.

"Snei, plamya, doroguye kracivia padruzya, tvoiya osparivat nachinaet" Valder calls to the two women following them.

"Pinemiesh, scritya odin. Ochen obyazani." Anastacia replies.

"Nichivo. Corosho ozatnichi." Aaron tells her in near-fluent Russian.

"Spacibo" is the reply, as the Russian-piloted British helicopter speeds up, roaring over the Suburban and pulling in front of them, kicking up a cloud of dust and sand as Adam skids the truck through a 180 degree reversal, and Robbie pops open the rear clamshell doors with the press of a pedal in the aft floor.

In front of them, the sun finishes cresting the low horizon, bathing the desert in warm pink, red, and orange light.

Ryan "Vyper" Wakefield, still wearing his Tazmanian Devil slippers, banks the chrome-painted F-111A Aardvark to the left, lining up on Coyote Canyon nearly a hundred miles ahead, according to his GPS.

The newly-risen sun sends orange, red, and pink reflections of the clouds rippling across the Aardvark’s fuselage and Ryan’s trademark silver-tinted wraparound Oakleys. The six-foot tall, black haired aviator smirks his trademark grin at the woman in the bombardier’s seat to his right.

"Let’s have some fun. Got our camera pods on?"

Her green eyes sparkling, as Vyper’s amusement is often quite contagious, the blonde five-seven ETF Commanding Officer, a former AF SpecOps pilot and former commander of the USS OHIO, grins back and flips a switch on the console in front of her.

"Big Brother’s active." Stacy "Immortal" Anrak replies as Ryan pushes the flight stick forward and dives the General Dynamics built fighter-bomber towards the hard-packed earth below.

"Hang on to your panties, we’re going in." Ryan adds with an ear-to-ear grin. "Oh.....shiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttt" Stacy yells as Vyper kicks in afterburners while plummeting almost straight down from 45,000 feet, the twin Pratt & Whitney TF30-P103 turbofans roaring their might, shattering the quiet of the New Mexico dawn.

"This is gonna be the most fun you’ve ever had with your clothes on." Ryan assures her as the ground gets closer and closer in their windscreen.

"Hang on...." Adam calls behind him as he twists Lil’ Abe’s steering wheel to the left and jams on the brakes, spinning the large Chevrolet in a cloud of dirt.

This move brings Robbie, sitting in a suspended harness just inside the open rear doors, into a perfect line-up on the Lynx. Robbie lifts the huge gatling-style paint gun, which can fire paint pellets at a rate of 400 per minute.

Robbie opens fire on the Westland, only to discover he is firing into open air. The Lynx is gone.

The helicopter has used its speed and agility to climb straight up, nose over, and end up tracking along the Suburban, flying sideways to keep its weapons aligned on the fleeing armored truck.

"Aw, crap." Adam mutters as he looks left, seeing the British-built helicopter pacing them out his window, cannon pods aligned directly on the Suburban’s driver’s door.

Suddenly, a shrill warning sounds in Anastacia’s ears.

"Missile lock, six high, someone’s got us." Tatyana calls to her pilot. The tone soon switches from a lock-on to a kill signal. The Lynx has just fallen prey to an as-yet unseen opponent. From the muffled curses coming from the radio, Anastacia guesses Lil’ Abe has been hit, too.

"Splash two, one helo, one Suburban," Stacy Anrak calls out over the radio as Wakefield pulls out of his roaring dive, less than fifty feet off the ground. As the Aardvark levels off, it is kicking up a monstrous rooster tail of sand and dust.

"Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehaaaaawwwwww!!!!" Ryan yells over the radio at the stunned Lynx and Suburban crews below, "You’re all clear, kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home."

"Ah, Ryan...." Aaron starts.

"I have ALWAYS wanted to say that." Vyper comments as he strokes the fighter-bomber’s throttles, roaring across the desert at just over scrub height.

"Are you ever going to grow up?" Immortal asks him.

"Not if I’m lucky." Ryan comments offhandedly, "Hey, Valder, why is it always the women who ask us that?" he quips.

"They don’t know any better. Knowing Immortal, it was probably rhetorical. We all know you’re a big kid, and wouldn’t have it any other way." Aaron Fieldman replies.

"Coming from a fellow six-year-old, I’ll take that at face value. Head’s Up Matrix!!!" Ryan yells into the radio as Stacy patches Wile E. Coyote Station and the two ground vehicles in the canyon into the conversation.

At Vyper’s yell, all six of the men and women on the ground look up to see the brilliantly reflecting F-111, wings full forward, come swooping around the bend of the canyon ahead of them. Pale Horse’s near-mirror polish on the chrome top of the fuselage shows a reflection of the canyon wall opposite the Aardvark’s upper half.

In a slow show pass, gear and flaps down, Ryan brings the F-111C towards the monster Lamborghini, Jeep Wrangler, and crew at almost 200 miles an hour, barely forty feet off the deck. In a surprising move, Wakefield flips the Aardvark inverted and loses altitude as he and Stacy near the ground team.

Swiftly reaching into the storage compartment over the Wrangler’s left rear wheel well, Matt Bendix pulls out his manual Cannon 35mm camera, pulls off the lens cap, and brings the camera to eye level in a single fluid motion. Adjusting the focus as he centers Pale Horse in the viewfinder, and starts snapping shots as fast as he can advance the film and re-focus as the Aardvark nears.

When the F-111 roars over the six, they can see themselves reflected in the mirror-like finish less than thirty feet above, and can also see Ryan and Stacy waving down at them. While waving with her left hand, Stacy is using a small automatic camera to snap pictures of her teammates below as they roar past overhead.

As soon as they are past the group, Ryan advances the twin TF30 throttles and kicks in the afterburners, retracting the gear and flaps as he pushes down on the stick, still inverted, starting a shallow outside climb for altitude. Soon the Aardvark is above the lip of the canyon, accelerating quickly into the New Mexico sky as Ryan starts to set the big fighter-bomber up for final approach.

As Ryan sets up for final, Joe Strano takes advantage of whatever terrain he can find as he heads the UH-1C Huey back towards the Station, practicing terrain-masking as the Iroquois full of pizza heads for the potential party at the base. Almost anytime one of the Eagles drops by Coyote Canyon, a party seems to ensue. With eight Eagles on the base tonight, a party seems a foregone conclusion.

Five minutes ahead of the Huey, Adam, Robbie, Aaron, and Wahren are racing across the desert, having just entered the complex of canyons from the northwest, less than three minutes, (at their present speed of eighty miles an hour), from the other two vehicles on the ground.

Buzzing around them, sometimes flying ahead as a forward scout, sometimes matching speed just of the Suburban’s roof, "Snow" and "Fire" are enjoying testing the Lynx’s maneuverability and speed.

During their most recent foray ahead, the Lynx roars over the Countach and Wrangler, heading for the base burrowed into the canyon walls. Instead of looping back to join the Suburban, they radio Lil’ Abe to tell them they are landing. Coming into the perimeter of Coyote Canyon’s AAA emplacements, Anastacia and Tatyana watch as the anti-aircraft gun and missile emplacements swivel to follow the helicopter’s every move.

They two women once again realize it is a damn good thing they have clearance to enter the canyon, as the defenses surrounding the base are strong enough to knock down an opposing armada. Though they can see many emplacements as they near the actual hangars and facilities burrowed into the canyon, they know they have missed at least three times as many more camouflaged around the whole complex of canyons.

In all, there are more AAA sites surrounding the canyon complex than any other site in the world, if the military only knew it. The only other places that come close are historical wartime Baghdad and Hanoi in their primes.

Anastacia manipulates the throttle, collective, and cyclic to place the Lynx into a hover as she waits for the ground crew to open the hangar door and allow them to land.

One of the four, smaller, 30’ wide by 15’ tall hangar doors rolls open as the Anastacia lowers the Lynx to the ground, taxis forward at speed, then shuts down the rotors, coasting into the cavernous hangar, about the size of football field in depth, and five times that in length, shutting down their rotors so as not to create a windstorm in the enclosed area. By the time Anastacia and Tatyana’s helicopter has rolled to a stop between the Cavalry’s other imports, a Mil Mi-24D Hind and Eurocopter PAH-2A Tigre, the rotors have quit their turning altogether.

The doors on either side of the Lynx’s cockpit open, and Anastacia Velchenko and Tatyana Fyoderenkov step out onto the spotless gray concrete floor of the hangar as the huge hangar door behind them rolls to a close.

As they interior lights of the hangar come slowly to their full brightness, Snow and Flame can see that, although other men and women of the Cavalry are moving about the other V/STOL aircraft in the hangar complex, the ground crews are doing so in relative silence and absolute coordination, working with the speed and discipline seen in NASCAR pit crews.

Off to either side of the three imported helos, the two newest Cavalry members can see three AH-64 Apaches, one Longbow and two original versions, two AH-1W Supercobras, an RAH-66A Commanche, MH-60G Pavehawk, CH-53 Sea Stallion, CV-22A Osprey and MV-22A Pave Eagle aircraft. Farther back to their right, Matrix’s pride and joy are parked, an AV-8B Harrier II configured to the night attack version, and a brand-new AV-35C Joint Strike Fighter. The two jets are gleaming, as they always are after the ground crew finishes with them, awaiting their pilot to take them for a spin.

Velchenko and Fyoderenkov quickly walk through a door at the back of the hangar, and enter a hallway that will lead them to their quarters, after passing the FlightOps, Weather, WarPlans and Maintenance offices, so they can change before meeting up with the others.

After watching the Lynx roar over them, Matt, Doug, Michaela, and Marie climb back into the Wrangler and head off for Wile E. Coyote Station, Mitch and Carmen closing down the doors on the monster Lamborghini as they turn to follow. Behind them, around the same corner Ryan’s F-111 had banked minutes earlier, Lil’ Abe roars through the canyon in an attempt to catch the other two vehicles, Adam taking the turn on two wheels, the right wheels in the air as they roar around the right turn, narrowly keeping the big truck from flipping over as he navigates the bend at ninety miles an hour. Beside and behind him, Robbie, Wahren and Aaron lean to their right to help keep the armored vehicle from flipping, Aaron checking his seat belt’s security as Adam wiggles the steering wheel left, dropping the right wheels back to the dirt as they exit the turn. Ahead, all four of them can see the rooster tails being kicked up by the Wrangler and Countach.

Adam grins and pushes harder down on the gas pedal as he attempts to catch the fleeing vehicles, hoping to pass them before they reach the familiar grounds of the base.

"Faster, Matrix, must go faster." Matt Bendix mutters under his breath as he watches the Suburban slowly close the gap between them. As he finishes this statement, the Cavalry’s white UH-1C "thwups" by barely ten feet overhead, the uniquely Huey sound telling them that dinner has arrived in Coyote Canyon. As the Iroquois flies over, Bendix can see Vision and SpiderWoman waving at them through the open side doors, as Apache ad Incoming are piloting the ancient helo to the base. "Grub’s on. Really, Matrix, we’ve GOT to speed up!"

"Maybe if Cleo and Ember dumped you out, we’d go faster." Doug quips to him.

"Please, my Xterra goes faster. You need a new truck." Matt comments.

Doug Danko arches an eyebrow as he looks back at Matt, and Marie Cordova shakes her head from the passenger’s seat. She knows that look too well.

"Hang on, Ember, this is gonna get hairy." she comments to the redhead behind her.

With a loud growl as Doug mashes the accelerator, the Wrangler fairly leaps ahead, quickly catching Mavrick’s Lamborghini, which they have been following. In response, Mitch increases his monster Countach’s speed as well, and, at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the three vehicles round the shallow curve that brings them into site of the longest straight stretch of the canyon, almost a mile and a half in length, where Wile E. Coyote station is built into the canyon walls. The Suburban is less than fifty feet behind them as they break out into the open, kicking up a tremendous amount of dirt as they roar over the desert floor.

Forgotten for the moment by the racing Eagles below, Ryan "Vyper" Wakefield and his BN for this flight, Stacy "Immortal" Anrak, watch the canyon walls flash by as Ryan expertly maneuvers the F-111 through the twists an turns of the Coyote Canyon complex, finally able to level his wings as he banks around the corner the others have just taken.

As he levels the Aardvark out, Ryan lowers the aircraft’s gear and flaps as he lines the fighter-bomber up on the center of the canyon, knowing that, camouflaged by the sand-colored paint and light dusting of sand the Cavalry have laid over it, a mile-long runway lies in the middle of the canyon, able to handle anything up to a B-1B Lancer safely.

Pulling back on the throttle, Ryan grins as he feels Pale Horse settle into a shallow, nose-high descent towards the hidden runway.

"Ah, Ryan, the gang is right in our flight path." Stacy comments to him.

"I know. We’ll just wake ‘em up a bit." he replies.

Stacy looks at him for a second, notes his grin, and smiles herself while shaking her head.

"You know Mayhem’s going to kill you for this." She feels obligated to point out.

"Gotta catch me first." Ryan smirks as the three dark vehicles, the Suburban having overtaken the Wrangler and Countach, disappear from view under the Aardvark’s nosecone.

There are few things in the modern world more startling than a large aircraft suddenly appearing directly overhead, seeming close enough to touch. Intent on their race through the desert, Matrix, Mavrick, and Mayhem hadn’t noticed the sound of the F-111C coming into land from behind them. In fact, even Aaron and Wahren’s usually amazingly sensitive hearing has failed to pick up the engine noise of the fighter-bomber due to the volume of Bon Jovi over the Suburban’s sound system.

Suddenly, however, all ten people in the three-abreast vehicle are reminded that losing sight of Vyper, for any reason, often is a huge mistake.

Appearing out of nowhere, the gloss-black underside of the Aardvark startles everyone as the aircraft’s shadow slithers over them, quickly shrinking as it and its creator get closer to meeting. The three vehicles are buffeted by the large fighter-bomber’s wing turbulence as Pale Horse settles to earth less than a hundred feet in front of them, its main gear kicking up a puff of dirt and smoke as they kiss the desert ground.

"Sunova..." Adam comments as he fights to keep the Chevrolet straight.

"Now THAT was a fancy piece of flying." Wolf comments from behind him.

"We’d have cut it closer, though." Valder adds.

"No thanks, it was PLENTY close from here." Mitch states from his Lamborghini, "I think I have tire marks on my roof."

"And I need my shorts cleaned. Anyone seen my hat?" Doug asks the others in the Wrangler.

"Might wanna check Vyper’s intakes." Ember suggests wryly.

There always seems to be something, doesn’t there? Right when I thought I’d gotten back in a writing groove again, events got dropped in my lap that made me take a hiatus. On August 19th, the ETF lost one of our founding members, as Kristina Hegedus-Spindel left our midst. For over a week, all ETF activities came to a grinding halt, and the webpage was temporarily shut down. That, and working two jobs six days a week tends to make for a lot less time for my writing. However, more work has been done to this story, and I’ve finally had the time to post it. Hope you enjoy!!!

Brian R. Kupfer

2 September 2002

1635hrs

Brandon, Florida