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(Note: Any resemblance to real people in some of these characters is probably deliberate, but is not intended to reflect upon the the personalities or reputations of the actual people they are based on. Not even slightly. Then there are the characters from Crimson Dagger.) The phone rings. The guy reading his newspaper picks it up somewhat awkwardly and has to turn the handset around before bringing it to his ear. The secretary says who it is before switching the call through. "Hi George, it's Keith," the caller identifies himself, "You know that deal we discussed with Ike about the dissolution of Mr. Gordon's company-" "Deal's off, sorry," George answers bluntly, "Ike and I have already discussed it." "Yeah, that's what he said," Keith moans, "but how am I supposed to run a space program without the necessary talent?" "Space program?" George wonders. He thinks about the new, top secret space program for a moment, then realizes that Keith has been put in charge of his own national civilian space department down there in the States, "oh, that space program. I'm sorry, I wish I could tell you, but if Ike won't bring it up with you, I can't even flirt with the confidence of the most powerful public figure on the planet." "I understand," Keith sighs, "Could it be related to the events in Iceland ten months ago?" "Probably," George concedes, "That's all you get out of me, sorry." Twenty years later, Ms. Andrianova is giving Ms. Kirov the tour of "Mount One", the Xenonauts' main base near Jabal Al-Lawz, the world's most unassailable peak from a political perspective (really! It's also a very good place for a first base in actual gameplay.) "So, what do you think of our new interceptor?" the former sniper with no legs asks. "Um... My briefing package said it's based on the MiG-31 Foxhound, but it doesn't look much like a Foxhound at all," Kseniya points to the back of the aircraft, "There's no tailplane, and up here," she points to the intakes, "the ramps are sideways, not downward as on the Foxhound. It looks more like that-" she's not a pilot, so she struggles to remember. "...Canadian plane." "The Avro CF-105 Arrow are you thinking?" Nina offers. "Yeah," the rookie confirms. "And so it is," Andrianova spins her wheelchair around and starts rolling off to the next hangar, "Come on, if you liked that, you're going to love the Charlie dropship." The once famous sniper actually laughs as her new protege struggles to catch up. "Sure," Kseniya Kirov double times it beside the sniper who has been using her arms as legs for the last twenty years, and those arms could swing a PTRS-41 rifle like a bat before she lost her legs in Iceland. "I'm really wondering how you can get a Chinook helicopter to go 295 knots for four d- ...uhm" The sight before her doesn't even remotely resemble a Chinook helicopter, nor any other type of helicopter, but with high wings, four fat propellers, a short landing gear with huge tires, and dark grey, nearly off-black paint she hasn't seen in pictures of the openly seen aircraft this one is obviously based on. Several bulbous fairings added to the fuselage both ahead of and behind the landing gear, with scorched holes in their undersides, betray how it lands on a dime beside the UFOs brought down by the other aircraft. The hangar smells slightly of ammonia and nitrogen dioxide, which burn at her nostrils. "It's a freakin' Herc with rockets!!" Kseniya squawks in unbridled surprise. Taking a moment to calm herself, she says, "So why does the briefing package have pictures of a modified CH-47 instead of the C-130 this thing is actually based on?" "We're a secretive bunch," Nina smiles. Author's note: I came up with this little story because the performance specifications of Charlie can't be filled by a helicopter. So I came up with the most reasonable compromise for a dropship of that specification: a fixed-wing tactical transport that operates from its base using a runway, and from field sites using hypergolic rockets, possibly with some help from the actual JATOs used for lifting some Hercules transports off from short fields with heavy loads. I thought the date of the Iceland Incident was very interesting in the context of real aeronautical history: On 1957 October 4, two space ages were inaugurated: the Avro CF-105 Arrow was rolled out, an aircraft with such performance that it is today only barely matched by the F-22 Raptor, which only has the advantage below 20,000 feet where an Arrow pilot would go to some length to avoid being intercepted if the plane actually went into service. I forgot what the other event that day was On 1958 March 25, she first flew. On 1958 April 23, the Iceland Incident did not happen in real life. On 1958 November 11, Spud Potocki piloted a prototype Arrow to at least Mach 1.96 in a climb at 45,000 feet without even flooring the downrated J75-P3 engines fitted to the prototype while the production PS-13 Iroquois engines by Orenda were working out their numerous bugs on the test stand. The thrust at that point was equivalent to military throttle on the PS-13 Iroquois - maximum thrust without afterburner. If you pushed the afterburners to the stop on the production model for too long, somewhere around Mach 2.30 to Mach 2.50, either the intakes would choke, the wings would melt, or both. That flight ended badly, as the fly-by-wire system (yes, in 1958!!) mysteriously twitched the elevons down right when Spud applied the wheel brakes, taking the weight off the main gear. The tires locked and exploded, and the plane skidded off the runway and ground looped onto its belly, leaving its landing gear legs somewhere over there, there, and there. The pilot was grateful the glitch didn't happen at nearly Mach 2! On 1959 February 20, Black Friday, the Arrow was cancelled. Two months later, the chief aerodynamicist went to Space Task Group, later known as Manned Space Center and Johnson Space Center, and single-handedly designed the Gemini spacecraft. A bunch more ex-Avro employees went to North American Aviation to build the Apollo spacecraft and later the Space Shuttle, some went to Europe to build the Concorde, and there were plenty more who found themselves in Mission Control (one of them, John Hodges, gave "The Trench" (FIDO, Retro, Guidance) its name because of the resemblance of discarded air parcel cans on the floor to the artillery shells he had seen in WWII.) There is no way NASA would have had the talent to realize the lunar landings without the infamous cancellation of the Arrow. While that may be true, it consciously being the reason for the Arrow's cancellation, as I speculate at the beginning of this story, is just an intriguing possibility that is completely satirical (...I hope!!)