“I wish it was as easy to make decisions as they think. Damn, I wish it was as easy as I thought before I got this job. Sometimes there are no right decisions are there? There are only the less wrong decisions. And we made a lot of wrong decisions didn’t we?”
The Seer sighed. “This hasn’t been our proudest hour, no. We’ve made a lot of errors all of us. This whole story has been one of mistakes, made honestly and in good faith, but mistakes none the less. From the best of motives, mostly, from lack of knowledge, often, from making assumptions based on too little evidence and then treating those assumptions as facts, all too often. The old proverb says that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ and we’ve just seen a perfect example. If we could go back, make a few small changes in decisions, we could avoid this. But, we can never go back, all we can do is say to ourselves that this tale was one of mistakes and errors of judgment and try not to repeat them.”
Ortega farm, Rosario, Surigao del Sur
A few miles away from Rosario, in the hills that overlooked the town, Graciella Ortega returned to her little vegetable farm. She’d taken a ride in a bicycle taxi this time, her stomach hurt far too much to let her make the long walk up the hill. Her doctors had been very firm, if she felt any sign of stress, she was to rest immediately. Her wounds had come within a hair’s breadth of killing her and she would have to take great care of herself lest the job be finished.
But, she had to come. Her vegetables had been neglected and she knew the crop was lost. The jungle would be taking back the little field and she would have to weed and hoe with care for the snakes would also have returned. Then, she went dizzy with fear. There were men in her farm.
The fear went quickly for the men were big, Australians. And was replaced by relief, for her farm was beautiful, the rows neatly weeded, the ground between them carefully hoed. The plants had been watered properly, at dusk so the midday sun wouldn’t burn their leaves.
“Missus Ortega? Good to see you up again. The boys here, we were all brought up on farms back home and we couldn’t stand to see a nice field go to ruin. So we looked after it for you.” The Australian soldier looked a little embarrassed. “Some of the produce was ripe and we didn’t want to see it wasted so we took it for our unit.”
He reached into a pocket and produced a grubby piece of paper. “We kept a list of everything and paid for it at market price. Your daughter has the money. Now Missus Ortega, will you look around and show us what we’ve missed. We’ll get it seen to. Feels good to be working a field again.”
B-58A “56-0213 “ On Final Approach to Carswell AFB,
0213 was a B-58A in name only; in fact she was a YB-58 that had been loosely upgraded to B-58A standard then used as a hack. She was tired and her controls were sloppy. This was her last flight, she was to be retired and broken up. Major Mike Kozlowski and his crew were bringing her back to Fort Worth so they could pick up their new aircraft, an RB-58F.
They’d picked her out off the production line a couple of weeks earlier, they’d been invited down by the Fort Worth management and given a VIP tour of the plant. That tour had ended with the final assembly area for the new RB-58F. They’d been invited to make their choice. The foreman had taken them around but when they’d stopped in front of one, he’d shaken his head slightly and led them to another.
“Odd thing about building these” he’d said “some of them are just right from the start, it’s as if they want to be put together and fly.”
He’d been right, this aircraft seemed to have an air of eagerness about her. “Can we have her?” Asked Kozlowski.
“Sure, Major. 64-9617. What you want to name her? Marisol II?”
Just as had happened six years earlier, the name just popped into his mind. Kozlowski shook his head. “No, she’s Xiomara. Spelt like this.” He wrote the name on a piece of paper and handed it over. “It’s a Latin American name, it’s pronounced Zomara.”
As he taxied the old B-58 in, Kozlowski felt himself finally saying goodbye to Marisol. She wasn’t entirely lost, Romano Mussolini had sent him a painting of her, with Sophia sitting in the cockpit and Kozlowski standing on the access ladder by the cockpit. It had come with an official sympathetic letter from the Speaker of the Legate and a much warmer personal note from Mussolini. Sophia and Carlo had also written to him, expressing sympathy and reminding him he always had somewhere to stay when he visited Italy.
The painting hung in his quarters now and sometimes, at night, he had spoken quietly to Marisol A couple of times, he had thought she’d answered but it had certainly been a dream. But, for all practical purposes, Marisol was gone. SAC investigators had carefully collected every piece of wreckage from her crash site and reassembled it in a hangar at Nellis. They’d learned a lot from that and those lessons had been included in the design of the RB-58F. That program had been delayed by almost six months as a result. Once the investigation was over, the wreckage had been buried under the Red Sun test range, an honor reserved for aircraft lost in combat.
Now Xiomara was standing on the hard-pad waiting to be flown out. Complete, she looked quite different to Marisol. Oh, the shape was the same, if one ignored the new engine nacelles, and the new wing shape. The perfect delta of the earlier versions had been modified by extending the wing root forward so that the leading edge was cranked at the inner engine pylon. From the side, that wasn’t obvious though.
What had changed was the color. Marisol’s brilliant chromed silver had been replaced by a soft, translucent blui.sh-silvery white, the same color used on the F-108 and the B-70. The national markings were now a darker shade of the same color, the previous blues, reds and whites muted. Even the nose art was muted now, a soft black-and gray portrait, instead of the full color. That was another result of Marisol’s death. Somehow, nobody knew how, SAC had got hold of full operational specifications of the electro-optical sights used to shoot down Marisol.
A study had shown that the system only worked well when aircraft had brilliant color contrasts and sharp reflections from highly-polished surfaces. Reduce those and the efficiency of the sight dropped dramatically. Hence the new paint scheme. The bean-counters in GAO had tried to use it as an excuse to end the custom of a single crew being assigned their own aircraft but their sally had been met by a virtual SAC mutiny. It had gone as high as SecDef who had ended it with a terse judgment, “if the crews want to keep their own aircraft, let them. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.”
Kozlowski actually preferred the new paint scheme, it made the older chrome silver and full color markings look old-fashioned somehow. Like cars with too much chrome and exaggerated tailfins. But, the color was just a detail. The real secret of the RB-58F was those engines, un-reheated J-58s that gave the aircraft more thrust cold than the older J-57s had on full afterburner. As a result, the RB-58F was a true supersonic bomber, cruising at Mach 2.8 and capable of dashing in at Mach 3.2 when needed. Even better, without the fuel-thirsty afterburners, the F model substantially outranged the older variants. Add in revised electronics that were more reliable than the older systems and a 30mm tail gun, the RB-58F was truly a new generation of Hustler.