“She also happens to be Avi Tamir’s daughter,” the Ganef said. “It would be difficult if she fell into the wrong hands.”
“I don’t plan on sending her inside at this time,” Habish said. “But if she were detained by, shall we say, the correct people, that might open up some interesting opportunities for new channels.”
“Your ‘opportunities’ are often too rushed, too dangerous.”
“They do work if properly developed,” Habish replied.
“Pursue it for now,” the Ganef told him. “I want to see a proposed budget.” Habish gathered up the file, rose, and left the office. He had just been made the case officer for a new operation.
The Director Lights on the bottom of the KC-10 indicated the F-15E was in position to hook up for an in-flight refueling. But the visual cues the pilot used to maintain station told him they had to taxi forward and climb a few feet. Close, but not perfect. The boom operator had the boom in trail and extended ten feet — they were ready for contact.
“Mike, you want this one?” the pilot, First Lieutenant Matt Pontowski, asked.
“Rog, I got it.”
Matt could feel his weapon systems office, Captain Mike Haney, take control of the stick. He almost chuckled at his backseater’s eagerness to fly the jet. The lieutenant liked flying with the older captain in his pit for Mike was one of the few backseaters that shared his penchant for bending rules. The Air Force was very careful about the men they selected to fly the super Eagle and known screw-offs were not allowed to even stand close. Both men knew that letting the wizzo, the unofficial name for weapon systems officer, fly the bird during an air-to-air refueling did more than just “bend” the regulations.
“Wizzos are worse than closet queens,” Matt ragged Haney. “All you want is a chance to come out and tell the world what you really are — something respectable like a pilot.” The lieutenant relaxed into his seat; he had turned Haney into a decent pilot, able to fly the jet if anything should happen to him.
“Air off, Matt,” Haney shot back. “I applied for pilot training, but when the Air Force found out my mother was married to my father, they made me go to navigator training.” They fell silent and Haney nudged the throttles and stick, rooting the fighter in position. The boomer on the tanker tried to fly the boom into the refueling receptacle located behind the fairing that streamlined the inboard leading edge of the left wing into the fuselage but missed. Matt hummed a few bars of “Try a Little Tenderness” over the UHF radio. On the third try, the boomer slid the nozzle down the ramp into the receptacle. It popped back out.
“Recycle your system,” a woman’s voice commanded over the radio.
“Shit,” Matt muttered. “Some broad getting on-the-job training as a boomer.” He reached for the fuel control panel, cycled the Fuel switch from open to close to open, and scanned the receptacle door. It was open. He glanced back at the tanker. All the visual clues were perfect and Haney had kept the fighter in a tight formation. “Not our problem,” Matt grumbled.
“Cut her some slack,” Haney said, “we all got to start some place.” This time the boomer made contact and six thousand pounds of fuel were quickly pumped into the Eagle. Haney easily compensated for the change in weight and kept the jet in position. Then they were finished and cleared off.
“Nice goin',” Matt conceded and took control. Haney grunted and went to work, calling up the low-level part of their mission that he had loaded into the navigation computers. The map on the Tactical Situation Display (TSD) in both cockpits cycled and the electronic moving map started to scroll, showing them their position and new route. The command steering bar in the Head Up Display (HUD) in front of Matt slued to the right, showing him the new heading to the first steer point that entered them onto the route that twisted and turned through the desert and mountains of northern Arizona and Nevada.
Matt dropped the fighter down to two hundred feet above the deck and coupled the autopilot to the Terrain-Following Radar while Haney used the mapping function of the Synthetic Aperture Radar to double-check their positions. Satisfied that the laser ring gyro in the inertial navigation system was not drifting outside acceptable limits, he hit the EMIS switch that limited their electronic emissions and went into silent running. The two men were a loose, but well-coordinated team.
They overflew the low-level entry point and the system automatically programmed to the next steer point and, again, the command steering bar slued to a new heading. The autopilot followed and loaded the F-15 with four g’s in the turn onto its new course. Matt visually checked their position and calculated they were running three hundred meters abeam of their intended track. He glanced inside the cockpit and checked the TSD. The multicolored moving map on his center screen held them at the same position. The system was accurate.
While they were on the low-level part of their mission rooting around in the rocks and weeds, Matt would constantly double-check the systems in the aircraft, ready to go to a backup mode if one failed. If pressed on the matter, Matt would admit that he did not fully trust the Terrain-Following Radar and was reluctant to use it below two hundred feet.
If they had to, he and Haney would pull out maps they had prepared and resort to old-fashioned map reading and dead reckoning as the primary means of navigation. But that had never happened on a mission, only in the simulator. When the systems worked as advertised, Matt felt more like a passenger than a pilot when they flew the rigidly constructed mission they had flight-planned on the ground. He was slightly bored and secretly wished that something would go wrong to spice up the flight. He hated routine.
At predetermined points they had picked during day before for the penetration-type mission, Haney would hit the EMIS switch, bring the APG-70 radar to life, and do a few sweeps of the area before returning to silent running. The highresolution radar would send a wealth of information through the processors and create a detailed, picturelike images of the area. Haney would freeze the pictures, making patch maps so he could refine and, if necessary, update their position in the nav computer. At the same time, he was constantly double-checking the systems. As long as the autopilot and Terrain-Following Radar were working, the wizzo was much busier than Matt.
On the third leg, a short eleven-mile dash across an open valley, Haney hit the EMIS switch and swept the area with the radar. “Two hits at one-three-five degrees, fifty-five miles,” he said, calling out two unidentified aircraft.
Matt mentally cursed for missing the two airborne targets that were to the southeast of them. He locked the lead return up with the radar and got an altitude readout — three thousand feet. You’re getting sloppy, he warned himself, a sure way to get your ass in a very deep crack. He broke the radar lock. The target Matt had locked on to was now displayed on the TSD as a red aircraft symbol. Then the Eagle jerked onto a new heading and flew up a canyon that would lead to the next valley.
“Didn’t think we’d have any company out here,” Matt mumbled, now fully alert and paying attention. He was thankful that his squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Locke, had paired him with the strongest wizzo in the squadron. It never occurred to him that Locke had matched them up for a reason.
The Terrain-Following Radar and autopilot worked perfectly and lifted them over a ridge at the head of the canyon before slamming them back onto the deck, keeping them at their set clearance limit of two hundred feet, and turning them to the south. Now they were on a new heading down a long valley, pointed in the general direction of the two unknown aircraft.