Belly of the Beast

Outside of God, only a few people know of the secrets that have unfolded in this vast expanse of desert. Every President since the 40’s has let something questionable but necessary happen here. Some of the projects have become public; atomic bomb tests, developing spy planes, the Stealth Fighter. The once fertile soil has been reduced to sand; punished under millennia of naked sunlight. The sparse vegetation clings to life, using frail roots to choke every drop of moisture out of the ground. This is a skeletal existence. Those with the strongest will to survive – unlike their lazy tropical counterparts – do so on the razor-thin wire of desert life.

A few small towns dot the outline of this area, well aware that they will remain unaware of what goes on in this black hole in southern Nevada, inhabited only by a small group of defense contractors and Air Force personnel unfortunate enough to be stationed here. Countless engineers and builders will never receive credit for the work they have done here; hundreds of miles of dirt roads blazed across the desert floor and up into the mountains. Mock airports complete with captured foreign aircraft. Houses and buildings constructed in the middle of open bombing ranges, just to be blown up, damage assessed, and built again.

Mike Kirovac will be satisfied if another secret left here in the desert was his own. Just an existence, predetermined by birth and death, verified by photos, with a mountain of paperwork in between, documenting a journey along an established path. Nothing new to report, nothing to contribute to our social progress. He has done what few have done before, but nothing to truly call his own. Hardship and heartache, pain and accomplishment, but nothing that people have not already written books about, or set procedures for. In his journey, through youthful rebellion, military service, combat deployments, and endless training, he searched for the perfect place to fade away for a final time. He has seen the beautiful, the colorful, the bizarre, the ancient, the rotten, the macabre, the hot and the cold, but never the unknown. But this, this enchanted emptiness, hidden away from the outside world, ruled by the cactus and the lizard, will be as close as he can get. He will be the unknown.

The Nellis Testing and Training Range has become a true home, ending a transient life that ultimately led him here. Growing up moving around empty Midwestern towns left him to dream of places with more substance and excitement. After high school, a final dispute with a girlfriend drove Mike to leave on his own wandering path, disappearing from friends and family in a fog of autonomy. A pre-existing passion for adrenaline led to a number of cities where he worked whatever and wherever he could. Construction, restaurants, answering phones, aviation. He worked just enough to support his habits of rock climbing, backpacking, and skydiving. Depending on the city, an overwhelming feeling of either boredom or conquest would push Mike on to the next place, until an impulse landed him in a chair across from an Air Force recruiter. Mike's demands for excitement and travel were met with a six-year enlistment as a Combat Controller. He ended a long silence with his family when the instructors at Basic Training made him call his parents to tell them he was graduating with honors. They attended the graduation ceremony, seeing Mike for the first time in nearly five years. Stories of the mountains he had climbed, celebrities he had met at various airports, near-death survival experiences, and the 106 jumps he had logged before enlisting were not told, simply summed up with, “I just went away.”

He volunteered for Special Tactics work, preferring the secret world away from Fox News, and instead carved out a small niche in an already small community; a space just big enough to squeeze in next to the SEAL teams, Special Forces, special intelligence teams, counter-terrorist units, and the other elites around the world. Six years has since turned into ten. Mike picked up a few names over the years, but the only one that really stuck was “Pro”, an open prefix.

Ever since its inception in 1947, the Air Force has always been looking to replace its current fleet of aircraft, searching for the next big leap to stay ahead of the country’s foes. The brass at the Pentagon will hang a contractual carrot in front of the CEO’s of leading manufacturers, outlining the specifications for the future of America’s Air Force. This immediately begins a process of doodling on cocktail napkins, which will be handed off to the thankless engineers who, locked in a shop floor dungeon and armed with a CAD program, transform an idea into numbers, angles, materials, and blueprints. The secrecy of the program then begins, not to deny the enemy, but to deny the other companies the competitive edge for the Government’s dollar. Proposals are submitted to the Air Force, and capitalism reigns. Sometime later down the line, a tangible example of the CEO’s dinnertime sketching ends up here in the desert to be put through its paces.

The Air Force then hand-picks a pioneer with enough balls and experience to climb in and break the Beast. For months, even years on end, the project and its personnel spend the development period here, away from the public, away from the comforts of a home base, away from the cover story the Air Force puts out to explain the strange sights in the sky and explain the time away to the wives. The truth lives here, protected by mountain ranges, and a few tight lips. After the scorching sun retreats for another day, the nocturnal return to find the limits of the Beast’s flight envelope.

And tonight, as the Beast runs free across the Range, Mike and few other night crawlers chase the Beast in a Pave Hawk helicopter flying the call sign CREEPY-22. From the right seat of the cockpit, Captain Steve Banhart commands a 4-man crew including Sam Gorman, a fellow Captain in the left seat. The two pilots scanned over their instrument panel through night vision goggles, hung before their eyes. A pair of enlisted men manned the weapon stations just behind the cockpit. Alex Dyer, a young aerial gunner, sat quietly in his outward-facing seat, behind the fearsome six-barreled minigun that hung out of the left-side window in front of him. In the opposite window, flight engineer Chris Vogt scanned outside.

Behind the flight crew, beneath the deafening pulse of turbine engines, a 3-man Special Tactics Team sits in the dark on what's left of the floor space, anchored to the aircraft by nylon lanyards attached to climbing harnesses. All of them share a history in the Air Force Special Operations community, and an interest in doing the dirty work with no pats on the back or even the satisfaction of relating their stories to anyone beyond these desert walls.

Specialized rescue equipment, a heavy fast-rope, heart monitors, oxygen bottles, and a massive internal fuel tank take up the rest of the cabin, all supporting the mission as a search-and-rescue aircraft in case the Beast were to go down. Sharing the open right side door with Mike was Casey Dunn, a Pararescueman. Casey spent his first few years in the Air Force turning wrenches on fighter jets, and actually landed a spot on the airshow circuit with the Thunderbirds. But after a year of waxing floors, polishing aircraft and spending hours every day grooming his uniforms, he turned around and volunteered for the blood, sweat, dirt, and guts of Pararescue. His eyes, a glowing tint of marbled jade, stared into the black desert beyond the helicopter. He lifted a hand from the carbine lying across his lap and he pointed out toward some exposed crags in the Belted mountain range. “There’s some nice virgin rock out there, man.”

Many of the team's days off are spent climbing in the forgotten corners of this land. As Casey pointed out, every now and then the team will find a new, untried area, and hike out for a few days. They can ascend to get front row seats to the bombing ranges below. They are crownless kings, conquering the peaks of a false empire.

Across the dark cabin, under the red light of his helmet-mounted lamp, Phillip Camacho flipped through the pages of a small notepad. These support flights have become routine, almost boring; flying big circles around the desert for hours, waiting for the CEO’s design flaws to surface. The pilots who fly the team around get to log the hours, building time towards their next promotion or aircraft. But the back-seaters get next to nothing out of it, sparing some conversation and crag spotting. One such conversation led to the naming of the fast-rope system “James Tango Morrison”, a compromise after several disputes over the phrase, “Ride the Snake.” Fans of The Doors’ song “The End” feuded with fans of Jim Carrey’s Saturday Night Live sketch, “Jimmy Tango’s Fat Busters.”

Fortunately, as a veteran Pararescueman, Camacho was never a man to let his guard down. After a thorough review of his notes for tonight’s flight, he stuffed the notepad into his chest rig, behind a row of rifle magazines that spanned across his stomach. He then rolled up the sleeves of his desert camouflage uniform until they stretched around his bulging forearms; a move Mike had witnessed countless times before, no matter the temperature. It was part of Phillip’s pre-game routine, believing he was never more than a few minutes away from being elbow-deep in someone’s innards.

As Phillip turned off his red light, he replied to Casey’s discovery, “I checked it out, and there’s a decent bivy spot about 2 miles north of Wheelbarrow. Approach from the east, then rap down the bluffs on the west side. The lines will be short, but the face runs for a couple of klicks.”

Miles ahead of the team to the south, the white playa of Groom Lake stood out against the dark desert, even with no moon to illuminate it.

“BRONCO-1, this is COYOTE Control, cleared for low approach runway zero-three right.”

As the words crackled inside seven headsets in the helicopter, the experimental craft streaked past a remote control tower along the edge of the vast dry lake, surrounded by mountains, inhospitable desert, and decades of bullshit conspiracy theories that the public has smeared across it.

As a Combat Controller, Mike supports the two PJs. They run in and do the dirty work saving lives while Mike runs right behind them and takes care of communications. The PJs carry backpacks of medical gear, while Mike carries a pack full of radios, spare batteries, encryption devices, signal panels, and antennas. By trade, Mike is an air traffic controller. Strip away the guns and the gear and you get just another dude talking to airplanes over the radio. But unlike his civilian counterparts, Mike does not operate from the comfort of a lofty tower with a radar scope. The dirt is his humble tower, and his only tools are a list of frequencies and call signs, wrist-top GPS, handheld weather station, and various radios.

Casey asked to Camacho, “So what do you think, 2 or 3 days?”
“Yeah, 3 days would be good. We rotate out next week. We could go then.”

Mike chimed in with a barb. “3 days? Damn Phillip, with that much time, you might even find a climb you can finish!”
“Not if you’re leading, Mike. You can have your twelves; I’ll take a seven any day.”

Mike had developed a reputation for seeking out hard climbing routes, usually leaving his teammates below.

A frantic message garbled over the radio, and Captain Banhart raised a hand from the controls, signaling everyone to shut up and listen.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday! BRONCO-1 dead stick. Heading zero-three-zero. Thirty-seven twenty twenty-five, one-one-five forty-four fifteen. Mayday, mayday, mayday!!”

The Beast screamed caution and warning behind the pilot’s voice. Camacho quickly recovered his notepad, and scribbled down the stream of numbers.

HDG 030 37° 20’ 25” N 115° 44’ 15 W Engine out

“BRONCO’S punching out!”

Beyond a ridgeline miles away, an orange fireball pierced the darkness through the front windows of the helicopter. The team fidgeted and exchanged wide-eyed looks before hearing the poignant call they live to answer.

“CREEPY-22, this is COYOTE, BRONCO-1 is down, move inbound to last coordinates.”

Despite the mutual danger, the Special Tactics Team allowed themselves a tacit satisfaction, knowing that it was finally their time to switch on and perform. Captain Banhart pushed the helicopter down to ground level, opening a flood of action. Mike and his teammates swung their night vision down from their helmets, transforming the desert into varied shades of green. The Pararescuemen mounted their medical packs, and Mike followed suit with his pack of radios and batteries. Camacho suppressed a surge of adrenaline and flicked a glance at his watch, initiating a practical rescue timeline. Casey smiled and flashed his own notepad at Mike, away from Camacho’s sight.

“GAME TIME”

Up front, through an endless sequence of throwing switches and pushing buttons, the pilots activated locator systems and scanned radio frequencies. Around a fold in the green landscape, the Beast had been gutted in a deep laceration that ran up and down the Groom mountain range. A shapeless field of flames defied the night’s dark silence, overloading night vision with a brilliant white-out. “NOD’s are nil. Too much light from the fires.”

The team simultaneously flipped up their goggles. The wreckage and fires extended over a quarter-mile in a valley stranded between two parallel ridgelines. A dry riverbed cuts through the ridge to the east, exposing tonight’s secrets to the public lands that lay beyond the Range. Captain Banhart entered a left-hand orbit around the crash site, and every pair of eyes hung out of the doors and windows, searching for any sign of the pilot. Shortly after, Captain Gorman announced the failure of their thermal visual aid. “FLIR is nil. The fire’s making everything too hot.”

“It’s just not our fuckin’ night,” Casey snapped.

As Phillip noticed the passing of the four minute mark, he ran through a mental list of possible injuries. Impact trauma, concussion, and four minutes of exposure to a fiery, unmarked grave. Captain Gorman reported a burst of information on one of his panel screens. “Boss, I got a hit from his prick-12.”

After a parachute landing, a downed airman should broadcast a beacon signal with their survival radio, followed by a voice command, updating his position and condition. The rescue forces know this procedure just as well as the flight crews, as failure to follow these steps could indicate a number of problems. His radio could be malfunctioning, or he may by physically unable to use his voice due to injury. In combat, he may have landed in a bad neighborhood and can’t speak without risking capture.

No one spoke as the team waited for the pilot’s voice command. In their silent thoughts, they would rather hear nothing at all than just the beacon. Being held in the middle ground between searching and rescuing allows the mind to race, betraying their professionalism. Mike pressed his lips together as he watched blades of fire lick the desert below him.

Captain Banhart broke the silence and broadcasted over the frequency, trying to raise the pilot. His commands rolled over the airwaves with an unpunctuated, monotone signature, “BRONCO this is CREEPY how copy over.”

The radio waves beamed into the deaf, endless desert. As the silence yielded to the immutable whine of the helicopter’s engines, all seven men aboard CREEPY-22 intensely scanned their sectors, suppressing any expectation of the downed pilot’s response. Captain Banhart called again, slower and more deliberate.

“BRONCO, this is CREEPY, how copy? Over.”

The helicopter entered a wide column of black smoke rising from the valley. The cabin went dark and blurry, and Mike held his breath against the hot prowling clouds. His eyes watered, and he could hear a faint cough from elsewhere in the aircraft. The helicopter emerged into the clear, natural air, and the team regained the burning scene below. As flamecast shadows danced around the cabin, Dyer let out a compassionate plea, “Christ, he’s burning up down there.”

“BRONCO, this is CREEPY, nothing heard, switching to Alpha, over.”

Phillip snapped away from the wreckage below, and spotted Tikaboo Peak, twenty miles across a vast valley to the east. On the peak, a vulturous group of UFO watchers and conspiracy theorists are surely watching the night’s events with binoculars and a radio scanner in hand. From their public vantage point, they already know that a secret aircraft has crashed in a restricted area, and they can hear every word that the team transmits. With the rest of his team watching, Phillip pointed out to the land beyond the Range, beyond his control.

“They know we’re here.”

Phillip crossed the cabin in disgust to approach Mike. He pulled his microphone away from his mouth to eliminate any possible misunderstanding as he spoke directly into Mike’s eyes. “Pro, ready Uniform Secure. I don’t want those motherfuckers listening if this guy’s hurt.”

Any sensitive information would have to be transmitted on an encrypted frequency, available only to the big radio in Mike’s pack. Camacho resumed his post, and Mike punched away at a keypad on his shoulder.

“BRONCO, this is CREEPY, nothing heard, switching to Guard, over.”

After another volley went unheeded, the pilot of CREEPY-22 changed his tone, stripping his voice of his commissioned rank, thousands of flight hours, instinctive radio protocols, and instead spoke with the voice of a father. The voice of Steve Banhart. “BRONCO, if you can hear me, for some reason I can’t hear you. I need to know where you are so we can get you out of there, sir. Acknowledge.”

Flustered, Captain Banhart turned in his seat to look at Camacho. “What do you think Phillip?”
“He’s alive enough to pull out his radio and turn it on. That’s no accident. He’s alive.”

Years of professional familiarity between the pilot and the lead PJ cut through the question of what to do next. “I can’t see any place to set it down. It’s bad ground.”
“We’ll need to go in upwind, as close as you can.”
“Ok, you pick your spot, Phillip. I’ll call the height.”

Camacho returned his focus outboard, rested one hand on Dyer’s back and with the other, pointed to a specific spot in the valley near one end of the crash site. “Give me a rope, right there.”

After Dyer relayed the spot to Captain Banhart, the pilot-in-command approved the fast-rope insertion. “Ok Phillip, I’ll getcha in there.”

As the flight crew discussed wind directions, entry and egress routes, and drop height, Camacho quickly briefed his team. “We’re dropping at the southeast corner. Casey, you’re number 1 out the door. Pro, you’re number 2, and I’ll be right on your ass. Regroup 20 meters off the nose, and we’ll sweep to the north. Stay in sight! Whoever finds him takes the airway. Questions?”

Mike and Casey accepted the plan with confidence and small nods. “Ok gentlemen. Be smart out there.”

Camacho returned to Dyer’s side, leaving the two other men to sink into their final preparations. Mike secured his carbine to his hip with a catch loop on his belt, and then slid a pair of heavy leather gloves over his work gloves. Casey crossed over to the left side of the cabin and broke a set of red chemlights taped to the bottom end of the fast-rope, bringing the long serpent to life. Together, Phillip and Casey reached up to the ceiling to extend a bar with the top end of the rope out of the left door. Mike pulled protective goggles down from his helmet, fitting snugly over his eyes. As the aircraft circled around to approach the south side of the crash site, Captain Banhart called to the team, “The drop will be six-zero feet. 1 minute out.”

Camacho replied, “Ok Boss, we’re going off comm.”

Captain Gorman turned around to send them off with a nod, “Go get him, boys!”

The Special Tactics Team detached the lanyards from the floor, and unplugged their headsets from the aircraft’s intercom system, plugging into their personal radios. As the umbilicals were severed, the 3-man team became ALBAN-07. Casey sat down at the edge of the door, feet hanging overboard. With an anxious breath, Mike checked his gear one last time, and then crouched behind Casey, waiting his turn. Captain Banhart banked hard into a committing turn toward the realm of the Beast, and then pulled back on the reins, sliding the helicopter into a hover sixty feet above the flames. Vogt called, “Rope out!”

Camacho released the coils of rope, plunging into the conflagration that awaited them. Dyer watched the chemlights as the rope fell, confirming that the bottom of the rope lay on the ground. With Dyer’s approval, Camacho aimed a tyrannical point of his entire arm directly at Casey. “GO!!” Clasping the rope next to his head, Casey leaned outboard and slid down into the pit. The hot, crispy fumes of turbine exhaust howling out of the engines blasted Mike as he knelt at the door, reaching for the rippling rope. Beholding the wild inferno that lay below him, knowing he would soon be there, Mike smiled from the masterful control of being exactly where he wanted to be.

At Camacho’s command, he stepped out and slid away from the aircraft. The thick nylon scales ran through his hands, biting through the gloves with a poisonous friction. The Beast challenged Mike with a fiery breath as he descended, towering over him from its ruptured bowels. Mike looked down the rope, and could only make out a strip of reflective tape on Casey’s helmet sprint away toward the front of the helicopter. After touching down on the rocky sand, Mike cleared the rope, ripped his carbine out of its catch, and ran to kneel next to Casey. Casey beamed a contemptuous stare straight into the fires before him.

“COYOTE, this is CREEPY, ALBAN-07 is on the ground.”

The helicopter roared above their heads, slapping the flames and blasting the men with sand and loose rocks shot out from the down wash. Mike stripped off his leather gloves, then looked over his shoulder to see Camacho’s silhouette slither down to the ground. As he cleared, Dyer released the top end of the rope, collapsing into a limp pile on the desert floor. Captain Banhart pulled the helicopter back into orbit, and vanished into the dusty blur above. As Camacho waved the team onward, the Pararescuemen led the charge into a field of burning metal intestines.

A wall of heat raced up Mike’s sleeves, igniting his nervous system with a jolt of fighting response. A smoky ceiling hung over their heads and entombed the team in a blistered orange glow. Mike ducked under a tail section that had sliced through a tall saguaro cactus, and the exposed wiring boiled to a neon liquid, dripping into a molten pool in the sand. To his left, Casey jogged past the disarray of a ravaged metal carcass, torqued and devoured by impact force and secondary fires. Up ahead, a wing spar punctured through what remained of the skeletal framing and jutted into the black smoke. A strong updraft carried a syncopated crackle of combustion and the musk of wasted kerosene.

The fires consumed all of the oxygen in the air, leaving the men to suck on the hot carbon remnants. Visibility dropped, and the temperature surged close to two hundred degrees. ‘I have to stop,’ Mike thought. He looked back, but found himself surrounded by flames reaching to pull him in. He could not see where he had entered, or a path leading out. He dropped to one knee, but the hot sand shocked the nerves in his leg, springing him back to his feet. The helicopter chirped from somewhere up above, waiting for a command.

Standing alone in the flaming labyrinth, Mike pulled the hose of his water bladder to his mouth, and sucked in a mouthful of near-boiling water, scalding his tongue. He had to spit it out with no relief. Mike’s brain cooked under his skull and helmet. He coughed out a breath of smoke, and then another, and struggled to find clean air. Breathless, disoriented, no water, and burning up. Mike had been pushed to the point of personal survival, and the clock was ticking. His body screamed at him that it wanted out, and now. But somewhere in this mess, the Beast had taken the pilot captive. Mike couldn’t walk out of there knowing that he’d be leaving behind someone who didn’t have that choice. Mike sucked in what little air he could, flipped his carbine skyward and ran to find his teammates. His pack slammed against his shoulders with every step. Through the haze of smoke and flame, Mike caught a glimpse of one of the PJs kicking over a warped metal panel. Ahead of him, the terrain inclined, and the two PJs continued the search uphill.

A blanket of toxins crept up the scorched hillside, littered with melted plastic and aluminum shards. Behind a column of black smoke, an orange and white parachute fluttered in the superheated air. Camacho’s attention snagged at the sight, and he ran to jump over a flaming sagebrush. At the end of a nylon marionette, the pilot’s body laid face-down in the sand. Flames spanned the reflection of Camacho’s goggles as he yelled, “Tally-ho!”

Phillip pounced to secure the pilot’s airway by pushing him over to his back. “Sir, can you hear me?!” He glanced over the pilot’s body, searching for any obvious injury, waiting in vain for a response. As he looked toward the feet, he noted a pair of broken ankles, but instead focused on the flames crawling closer and closer to their position. A green and black PRC-112 survival radio fell from the pilot’s gloved right hand, no longer used after he blacked out. A high-speed, low-altitude ejection translated to a hard landing, slamming the pilot into the side of the hill before the parachute could effectively operate. A few seconds of fleeting consciousness allowed him to pull out his radio and fire off the beacon signal.

Mike and Casey labored the last few steps up the hill to find Camacho assessing the pilot. Mike read the thoughts behind Phillip’s sober face as he hooked the pilot under the arms. ‘Broken bones never killed anyone.’ It was a morbid quip, one of an endless supply that Phillip keeps on hand to justify his many dynamic decisions. At the risk of incurring further injury, the PJs had to move the pilot out of the immediate danger, and treat him later. As the leader of the team, Camacho took command and gave orders. “I got no response Casey; let’s get him out of here, now!”

Casey grabbed the pilot’s leather flight boots, and the PJs carried the broken body uphill toward the cool, dark relief of the open desert. With his hands full, pushing up the hillside, Casey looked over his shoulder and called to Mike between tortured breaths, “Hey Mike, start working on the stretcher.”

Mike reached under Casey’s pack to release a pair of buckles holding a collapsible stretcher. The bundle dropped to Mike’s feet, and as the PJs carried on, Mike stopped to catch a breath and unfold the fabric and tubing. Once assembled, Mike swung the long board over his head and ran to meet the PJs at a ridgeline above the flames. After the PJs set the pilot down on the stretcher, Casey dragged an arm across his sweaty forehead and bent over with fatigue. Camacho keyed his radio to contact the orbiting helicopter. “CREEPY this is ALBAN-07 Alpha. We have a Tally-ho on the survivor, standby for an update on Uniform Secure, over.”

Camacho knelt over the pilot’s face, leaned in close, and pulled his headset from his ear to assess respiration. The long whimper of a punctured lung, struggling to function, did not please him. With only their dim red headlamps for light, the PJs zipped open the pilot’s survival vest and cut away the underlying olive flight suit. Mike took a knee and watched the two PJ’s navigate their hands through an algorithm, a series of priorities and decisions rehearsed to the point of automation. Every puncture, texture, fluid, protrusion, and response became a factor that played into a tailored solution.

After their assessment, Phillip was ready to relay his findings over the secure frequency. Mike handed off the telephone end of the radio just as Phillip pulled it away. “CREEPY this is ALBAN-07 Alpha. Confirmed Tally-ho on the survivor, condition is as follows: Unresponsive, breathing is slow and labored with left side tension pneumothorax. Pulse is 110 and thready. Blood pressure 75 over 50. Multiple burns and extremity fractures. We’ll re-contact on Victor Two, over.”

Finished with the radio, Camacho was also finished with Mike, and sent him away to keep the process moving. “Pro, I need the Stokes basket. Find us a way out of here.” Implicitly, he also wanted to simply keep Mike occupied, not allowing any distraction by the sight of an injured American. As Mike took his first step away, Camacho pulled him back by the arm, and hard. Excitement lit up his eyes as he barked, “Hey, don’t get lost!”

Mike moved down the ridgeline, hopping over sagebrush and cactus.