Kill or Be Killed

(Note: Bob Cornett and I wrote this story decades ago. I don't know who wrote what parts or whose idea it was. I can tell you that on the manuscript, Bob's name was first, but the story was typed on my typewriter (which, of course, gives you an idea of the age because I have been using a computer since 1985). The return address on the manuscript is mine as well. What this means is that here is a story for which both of us are responsible, written at the beginning of our collaboration. We wrote it prior to starting Seeds of War, which also puts it in the 1980s.)

Captain Robert Tucker, Air Force Public Affairs Officer, stood blinking at the studio lights behind the TV cameras in the crowded press room. He waited for a moment, as the last of the reporters sat down and got out their handheld cameras and their cell phones to record the event.

“Gentlemen and Ladies,” he said, clearing his throat.

When there seemed to be no reaction, he said it again but louder, “Gentlemen and Ladies.”

As the last of the noise died, he began. “I’m sure that all of you have heard by now, and are a bit confused by, all the reports of aerial combat that occurred this evening over downtown Galveston, Texas. We’re here to clarify the situation and to let everyone know that no one on the ground was at risk at any time during the dogfight.”

There was a murmur that seemed to travel around the room. When it fell quiet again, Tucker continued, “At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Major Charles Caldicott McKuen, the squadron commander of the First Sub-miniaturized Bravo Defense Force, and the first pilot to successfully engage, in aerial combat and destroy a killer bee.”

That last bewildered the reporters, but rather than shouting questions and demanding attention as they usually did, they sat quietly. It might have been respect for the military officers present, instructions given to them as the entered the press room, or just confusion about what was being said.

Tucker gestured to his left and said, “Major McKuen, if you will.”

McKuen moved to the center stage, stopped behind the lectern and then adjusted the microphone to his satisfaction. He was in his mid-thirties, about 5 ten, with dark hair cut so short it looked like a shadow on his head. He was wearing a sweat stained flight suit that might have been more for show than necessity. Normally, those at press briefings were in Class A uniforms, complete with awards and decorations and qualification badges. He stood straight, with both hands gripping the sides of the lectern. He surveyed the audience as if waiting for something or maybe expecting an assault.

A woman, in the back, stood and without being recognized shouted, “Major. Sally Behr, Fort Worth Evening Press. I have a question that I’m sure everyone else has. Just what in the hell is the First Sub-miniatured Bravo Defense Force?”

McKuen grinned, as if asked an easy question, and said, “To start with, I think we should go into the sub-miniaturization process itself, and then perhaps a brief history of the enemy, which brought about the first practical use of the sub-miniaturization process in aerial combat.”

One of the reporters for a television or cable station, standing next to her camera, shouted, “Is this some kind of secret project?”

McKuen asked, “Is there another kind?”

When the laughs died, he continued. “Approximately twenty years ago, a team of government physicists, working in the strictest secrecy at Los Alamos, became interested in the possibilities of utilizing the excess space that exists between various subatomic particles that make up the atom. The theory was put forward, at that time, by a scientist who wished to remain anonymous, that it might be possible to squeeze these elements together, thereby compacting the atom without altering its properties. The theory proved to be totally wrong, but it did lead to work in a related area which suggested that it is possible to actually shrink the atom rather than merely compacting it. This process resulted, not only in a reduction in size, but in a reduction in weight as well. The nature of the process is, quite naturally, classified for reasons of national security. Suffice it to say that it does, in fact, work, and subsequent tests proved it safe for use on organic creatures, as well as inanimate objects?”

“What good is that?” asked a reporter who didn’t bother to identify himself.

McKuen looked at the audience and spotted a man in the middle of the crowd. He was glaring at McKuen as if McKuen had called him a dirty name and slandered his family.

McKuen said, “Well, if you wanted to put a colony on Mars, and you could reduce the crew and colonists sufficiently, then you have the ability to send a great deal more food, equipment and colonists than you would if everything and everyone remained at a normal size.”

“How small?”

“There is a limit to the process. I can say that it is possible to shrink a human to a height of less than a millimeter.”

“Is that what this process, as you call it, was created to do?”

McKuen took a deep breath and said, “We are getting off topic here. I wanted to…

Another voice yelled, “You just said that we could reduce a human to something that is nearly microscopic and I assume all the food and equipment needed to build a city on another world. But it seems to me that a raindrop would be of sufficient size to crush your human or drown him.”

“You would enlarge him to normal size at the other end. There would just be many more humans available, and all their equipment and food could be carried in the rockets that are available to us today. We just need to design the proper capsule for them. But again, we are getting off topic here.”

“Are you telling us that we have already launched such a mission?”

“No. NO! Let me finish.” McKuen surveyed the crowd and then continued. “As you are aware, entomologists in this country have been concerned about the advance toward our southern border of a deadly strain of killer bees. These are even worse than those that arrived a couple of decades ago. It all started from genetic experiments in crossing a strain of the African bees with the more passive South American bees, which would create a docile bee that would produce more honey. Well, the experimental bees escaped and weren’t quite as docile as everyone hoped. Now, the original, more aggressive, and somewhat larger bees have also escape and are at our southern border. This is a threat greater than that posed by the original Africanized bees and one that we were tasked with neutralizing.”

He hesitated and then said, “The First Sub-miniaturized Bravo Defense Force, then, is an elite Air Force unit created specifically to deal with the bees on their own terms.”

Another voice interrupted. “Howard, Smythe, The Times, London. If I follow you Major, you actually miniaturized a whole squadron of Air Force fighter planes and sent them out to kill bees.” It sounded as if he couldn’t believe that he had heard what he heard.

“Well, I didn’t miniaturize them myself…”

When the laughter died, he added, “But we did go out to kill bees.”

“Isn’t that a bit drastic? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply spray them with Raid?”

“We couldn’t find a can big enough,” said McKuen and then, “Actually, this strain of bee is resistant to most pesticides. The concentration needed for a lethal dose would have been ecologically and environmentally unacceptable, and we worried about persistence of the chemicals in the environment. Since we had the technology to reduce sophisticated warplanes to a level where they would be effective against the bees and since no other means could be found to deal with this particular menace, the decision was made, at the highest levels of our government, at the civilian end I might add, to proceed with the formation and then activation of the First Sub-miniaturized Bravo Defense Force.”

He looked out at the reporters who now seemed to be somewhat reserved, as if stunned by the direction the conference had now taken or maybe believing that this was some sort of joke, though they couldn’t see the purpose. Filling the silence, McKuen said, “Not lost on the Pentagon brass, however, was the training benefits. Out pilots could build dogfighting skills by engaging the bees without a great deal of danger to themselves.”

McKuen pointed to another reporter who said. “Karl Harbstreet, host of the Weird Things Podcast. Can you describe the battle as it occurred?”

“I can do better than that. Lights, dim.”

Responding to the command, the lights dimmed and curtains descended, shutting out the sunlight.

“Replay, initiate.”

A solid ball of light appeared in front of the reporters, hovering five feet in the air. It fractured into a thousand bits which spun around rapidly, finally coalescing into a static display made up of tiny representations of the F-45 fighters, and the black and brown killer bees.

McKuen began his narration. “I was leading a squadron of eight sub-miniaturized fighters. We had been scrambled from Bowie Air Force Base about an hour earlier, when a spotter from the reactivated Ground Observer Corps reported contact with a swarm of killer bees approaching Galveston from the South. Our sub-miniaturized squadron had been carried aboard a modified Cessna mothership. I will note here that mine was not the only squadron carried into the battle, nor was our mothership the only one.”

McKuen allowed the display to advance, showing his squadron diving toward the bees. He said, “Our target, meaning my squadron’s, was the queen and we went after her as the other flights engaged the bees surrounding her. The bees formed a cocoon around her, rotating slowly in a clockwise direction. As you can see, as we approached, a force of bees broke away to intercept us, but they were attacked by the supporting squadrons.”

Now everyone had his or her attention fixed on the swirling mass of tiny points of light as they gyrated in the glowing cloud spinning above them. One of the fighter’s lights winked out as bees attacked it with their stingers but it was the mass of bees that overwhelmed the plane, knocking it from the sky. The fighters used their machine guns to engage the bees, the nearly invisible lines of tracers looking like tiny rays from some sort of futuristic battle. Bees began to fall but their images disappeared before they hit the floor. The fight turned into a giant furball as the opponents engaged.

McKuen said, “We had opted for gun pods rather than missiles. We weren’t sure the heat seekers would be able to home in on the bees, and the radar guided missiles might be lost in the bees’ stealth capabilities.”

A reported shouted, “You are saying that the bees had created way to defeat radar?”

McKuen smiled. “Not at all. They are soft targets without the solid surfaces that the radar required. Their bodies, covered with fur were theorized to have a stealth capability by absorbing the radar signal rather than reflecting it. Besides, we could not carry enough missiles to be practical. Twenty-millimeter cannon were a more effective weapon to use against them.”

He waited to see if there would be a follow up question and when there wasn’t, he said, “We selected the gun mode on the fire control system, and attacked.”

The glowing ball that had been showing the whole engagement, narrowed the focus to the bees that were surrounding the queen, and the tiny jets that were attacking. Dodging right and left, with all the fighters in his squadron aiming for the same target, they closed on the largest of the bees.

McKuen began his narration. “After missing on our second pass, my wingman and I executed a high-speed yo-yo maneuver.”

Although McKuen was gesturing with his hands, the display showed his aircraft, along with the wingman completing the maneuver. He said, “This brought us out high and to the rear of the queen. We pushed into a vertical rolling scissors, and snapped out of it just on the tail of the queen. At this point, my wingman had to peel off to deal with the stiff resistance on the drones nearest to the queen. I continued to close and when in firing range, squeezed off a short burst from the Vulcan cannon, shredding the queen’s wings and her body. She disintegrated in front of me and the rest of the swarm, without a leader, just scattered.”

There was a shout from the back. “This is quite obviously an experience that no one has had before, Major. How did it feel?”

“I guess it’s like warfare has always been.”

“What do you mean, Major.”

“Killer Bee, killed.”

 

Bob Cornett, My Friend is Gone

 

Just yesterday, April 1, Robert Charles Cornett, “Bob,” sometimes known as R C Squared, passed away. Bob and I had been friends for nearly a half century. We met while we were both taking Air Force ROTC at the University of Iowa in the early 1970s. We shared an interest in science fiction and writing and a few other things.

Bob had originally majored in both physics and Russian which seemed to be a very difficult path to follow. Eventually, he changed majors, and we both graduated in 1975. Bob remained in Iowa City.

It was in 1975 that I learned the Project Blue Book files had been declassified and were open for public scrutiny at Maxwell Air Force Base. Bob and I drove to Maxwell and began a search of those records. We might have been the first two outsiders to see those records. At the time, the names had not been redacted and we spent two days going through the index, writing down the names of all the witnesses for the unidentified sightings. At the time, this was a unique record but today the information is available on the Internet. That search translated into a few magazine articles about Project Blue Book and sparked Bob’s interest in UFOs.

Writing had always been one of his goals, though I suspect he was more interested in writing science fiction than he was in writing about UFOs. We had written a book of science fiction short stories that was never published, but some of them have been posted to www.thesciencefictionsite.blogspot.com.  

Bob had suggested that we talk to James van Allen about UFOs because he, Bob, knew van Allen. I thought it was just that Bob had taken a class from van Allen and it was a sort of nodding friendship. But, one day, in the Physic Building, van Allen got on the elevator with us. Van Allen looked at us and said, “Hi, Bob.”

And Bob said, “Hi, Van.”

Van Allen sat down with me for two hours to talk about UFOs. Bob missed the meeting for some reason but it would not have happened had he not known van Allen. That van Allen would talk to me about UFOs said something about Bob.

Bob doing UFO research in Colorado.

We did investigate cattle mutilations for APRO. Jim Lorenzen had called me, asking me to look into them. With Bob, we went to Minnesota and spent a week to ten days there, learning what we could. We had been told that these mutilations were part of Satanic rituals, but we found no evidence to support that claim. Nor did we find anything to suggest that UFOs had anything to do with it.

All this resulted in Jim Lorenzen introducing Bob at a UFO convention as one of his top investigators. The irony was that Bob belonged to the rival NICAP. But the recognition did help Bob place some stories about UFOs in the magazines that were popular at the time.

We began to attend science fiction conventions with an eye to meeting the editors working for publishers. We thought that if we met them, if they knew who we were, then we might have a leg up when a manuscript was submitted. I’m not sure if that ever worked in our favor, but we did meet Sharon Jarvis, an agent looking for writers. She recognized our military connection and one day called, wondering if we could write books about the Green Berets in Vietnam. We said yes and set about creating those books, now all recently republished under the banner of Vietnam Ground Zero. This did not erase our quest to write science fiction, and I don’t know if those books helped or not, but we did finally publish science fiction.

I was at home one night when Bob called and told me he had started a novel that dealt with a war in space. We planned to meet the next day and he suggested that I bring along something. His “chunk” of the book, as we came to call them, was in the third person but mine was in the first person. Before we were done, the book, Seeds of War, had five first person narrators, not all of whom survived the conflict, and the third person beginning in which Earth declared war on another planet. I mention this only because we used Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin speech as the basis for the one in the book. We didn’t have do change much. It was a commentary on war. It was a strange attitude for us because of our connections to the military.

Bob and I attended many science fiction conventions, even after we had books published. At a party hosted by Berkley Books, we ended up as volunteer bartenders about two in the morning. A very drunk science fiction fan wanted a Scotch, but we had run out of Scotch. He was so drunk that we didn’t think he would know the difference, so we made some Scotch for him, using gin, Pepsi, some wine and worked hard to make it look like Scotch. The man took it away happy.

Bob was popular on the science fiction circuit. I think it was a combination of things, including some of the stories that he wrote. He would do readings periodically, and I noticed that the fans sat quietly listening to his stories. He was sometimes slow in getting the story written, but it was always a good one. He was an imaginative writer, with a keen ear for human speech.

He was habitually late for nearly everything. We were to meet in Iowa City one day but I got interested in a movie and figured that Bob would be late. So, I watched the end of the movie and was more than an hour late. Bob showed up about twenty minutes after I got there.

Bob eventually left Iowa City, moving to Moulton, Iowa, and our writing sessions waned at that point. We did a number of limited series, including one about time travel that started with Remember the Alamo, in which the time travelers return to 1836, to win the battle for the Texicans by using modern weapons.

Bob with a UFO witness. Bob's in the raincoat.

But with the move to Moulton, our contacts, lessened. I became involved in UFO research and Bob stuck closer to the science fiction. I think the last science fiction convention we attended together was in 1991, about the time of the Gulf War. We hadn’t writing much together by that time. The Vietnam Ground Zero series had wound down and we didn’t have any contracts for science fiction novels.

Bob, had trained as an EMT while living in Moulton and at some point, had become a letter carrier. With his wife, MaryAnn, he eventually moved to Albuquerque where they hosted a few conventions.

Bob was interested in firearms and had a massive knowledge about them. Some of the writing about Vietnam showed just how much he knew about weapons. He was very good at describing the combat of the time. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force and later the Marines.

He was a very good friend and I wish that I had been a better friend to him. I knew that his health had been poor these last few years. I had him on the radio version of A Different Perspective, and was sadden by what I heard as we talked about UFOs. He just wasn’t as sharp as he had been when he was younger. You can listen to that show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/19655144

In the last several years, maybe the last couple of decades, he had lost his fire for writing. Bob Tucker, who turned out to be a good friend, had said in his later years that he had retired from writing. Neither Bob nor I could understand that attitude… but sometimes writing is a very difficult task. I think Bob retired from it without really saying that he was retired.

I had thought of writing a tribute to my friend, but this turned into more of a remembrance. I’m surprised by how much I miss him.

He was only 69.