Keith Douglass
Enemies
ONE
Greek Captain Antipodes Spiros flipped his American-built Tomcat into a tight barrel roll. He tilted his head back, braced against the ejection seat and stared up through the canopy above — no, below — no, above — hell, it was outside, that was all that mattered. Swaths of green earth that ran between ancient ruins and brown craggy low hills swapped places with a sky so blue it hurt his eyes. Spiros squinted his eyes until the colors ran together, until everything outside his cockpit dissolved into streamers of color and light.
“Enough!” his backseater howled.
Spiros ignored him, concentrating on the delightfully befuddled feeling creeping into his inner ear. A few more rolls and he’d be… there. It hit him all at once, the dizzying disorientation as the fluid in his ears roiled and bubbled against the delicate aural bones. He switched his gaze to the instruments, thoroughly disoriented, and eased the aircraft back into level flight.
Rolling, rolling, his mind insisted. Still turning, banking now, descending, ascending. A series of confused and inconsistent messages, each one increasingly urgent, each one dead wrong. Spiros watched the artificial horizon, the altimeter and accelerometer, and let his instruments convince him that he was in level flight.
“Why do you do this?” his backseater demanded. “Every time, every flight. If I vomit, you will clean it. Not me.”
Spiros chuckled. Irritating his backseater was just an added bonus. He could have explained, he supposed. It wouldn’t have hurt him to do so, nor would it have kept him from rolling himself sick at some point during every flight. Little did his backseater know that it was as much to keep his whining guy-in-back safe as it was to amuse a bored pilot.
Barreling his brains out came under the heading of preventive training. It was a habit he’d adopted during Tomcat pipeline at an American air base when a close friend of his had inadvertently stalled out, lost control of his aircraft in a flat spin, and been unable to recover. Spiros had listened over tactical as Kapi had screamed out his corrective actions, sobbing and wailing, damning the horizon that rotated around him and defied his Kapi’s best efforts to stabilize his aircraft. Finally, the backseater had punched them out, but they’d been too close to the ground. Neither had survived.
During the solemn debrief that’d followed, the IP — instructor-pilot — had been brutal in his conclusions.
“He got fixed on the horizon. His instruments were telling him the truth, but once you get disoriented, you can convince yourself real easily that the instruments are wrong. You start going with what you see instead of what the aircraft is telling you. Then you lose the bubble. Then you make an uncontrolled descent to the ground.” The IP had hammered out the narrative in a hard Texas twang, his voice a monotone. He’d stopped then, stared at the deadly quiet class.
“Every man in here believes it won’t happen to him. Well, it will. At some point, you’re going to get disoriented. You might have a head cold, an inner ear infection, or you might just be doing your damnedest to get away from some MiG on your ass. Whatever the cause, you’re going to lose it. If you’re not prepared for it, if you don’t believe what your instruments are telling you, you’re going to die just as surely as if you’d gotten a Sidewinder up your ass.”
In the days after that, the IPs had hit them particularly hard with in-flight emergencies, spins, loss of power, everything they’d been over in the preceding fourteen weeks. Haunted by the memories of Kapi’s last transmission, Spiros had sworn that he’d never, ever forget the lesson.
Hence the barrel rolls, the spins, constant aerobatics. By now he’d learned how to recognize when he was disoriented, how to rely on the instruments. And he’d come to believe that whatever else might happened to him while he was a pilot, he wouldn’t kill himself and his backseater by losing the bubble.
Mercifully, the RIO was too busy trying not to puke to continue berating him. If Spiros ignored the gagging sound, he could almost believe he was in a single-seater aircraft, alone in the sky, unencumbered by a wingman or lumbering transport to escort, with a straightforward mission to execute, one that required little more than what he loved to do best — flying.
Even the surveillance center was leaving him alone tonight. While the ground radar site was Greece’s first line of defense in the ongoing conflict with Macedonia, it could be a real pain in the ass for a pilot, particularly if the ground control intercept officer got nervous over a few barrel rolls. From the way they complained, you’d think that there was no need for airborne patrols.
But while the GCI’s long-range radar covered more sky than the radar mounted in this export model F-14 Tomcat, it had one major disadvantage. Contacts showed up as green-painted lozenges on scope, accompanied by an IFF identification if they were carrying the proper transponder. It might even break with a mode four IFF code, indicating that it was a friendly aircraft, a military one at that.
But even the finest radar could not put eyes on target, could not check the status of a wing loadout nor verify that a mode four aircraft was not actually an enemy fighter. While mode four was supposedly an infallible method of telling friends from foe, there were still instances in which daily crypto codes had been stolen and given to the other side.
Nowhere was the problem of fraternal treason more difficult than between Greece and Macedonia. The two countries were brothers, bound by blood ties stretching back thousands of centuries, into the mists of time before even Alexander the Great. In 1991, a misguided United Nations had recognized a small landlocked area the size of Belgium as the Republic of Macedonia. Spiros snorted in disgust. Macedonia was part of Greece, no matter how she manipulated the sentiments of foreign nations into thinking otherwise, no matter how the land had been apportioned following the world war. Even the name — Macedonia — belonged to Greece, not to some part of the artificial state that had been called Yugoslavia.
Why couldn’t they at least call it Skopja, the correct ancient name for the region? Or some name that incorporated Macedonia? That had been the Greek government’s latest capitulation in the face of overwhelming international pressure.
Personally, Spiros found that as much of an insult as calling it the Republic of Macedonia. No, it should go by its proper name, Skopje.
“Fifteen minutes,” his backseater called out, evidently now sufficiently recovered to resume his tiresome reminders. As if the fuel gauge were not mounted right in front of Spiros, as if the pilot could not see the seven-day clock ticking off the minutes. He knew they had fifteen minutes — fourteen now — before they commenced their return to base. He’d given himself just enough time to completely recover from the barrel rolls before he’d be on final approach. Spiros clicked his mike twice in acknowledgment and returned to his train of thought.
Not that it was entitled to independence anyway. Aside from the fact that it was historically wrong, it set a dangerous precedent. A large portion of the Greek coast on the Aegean was referred to as Greek Macedonia. This upstart mongrel country would soon make a move on that as well — indeed, they’d started already, claiming that Greece was abusing its ethnic Macedonian citizens.
The whole conflict had exploded when the smaller nations of the UN, each with its own independent agenda aimed at ensuring the rights of smaller countries, had began funneling weapons and aircraft into Macedonia. A few fighter aircraft, some anti-air batteries, and within a few months the renegades had staged a threatening presence on the border along Greek Macedonia. Access to the Aegean Sea, that’s what they wanted. And these patrols along the border were designed to ensure that the rebels didn’t get it.