Shit, Wentz thought.
Rainier offered a minuscule smile, stroking his beardless chin. “It’s unlike any mission you could ever imagine.”
“I can’t take it,” Wentz insisted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m retiring tomorrow. I promised my ex-wife and kid.”
“Don’t you at least want to know what the mission is?”
Wentz felt his fingernails scraping his palms. “No, because if you tell me, then I’ll just be that much more tempted to take it.”
Rainier eyed Smith and Ashton, cocked a brow. “A proposition, then. I won’t tell you. Check it out for yourself.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Wentz asked.
“Fly out to Nellis, right now, with Colonel Ashton. Assess the mission. If you don’t want it, that’s fine. We’ll get someone else, and I give you my personal guarantee that you’ll be back here tomorrow by noon to attend your retirement ceremony.”
Wentz gnawed his lower lip. “Putting it that way makes it damn hard to pass up, sir.”
“All we’re asking is that you investigate the mission and its details first-hand, General,” Smith stepped back in.
“And if I don’t like it, I walk?”
“Absolutely, sir. We’ll fly you straight back to this base and you can officially retire. Beyond that, the only thing we’d ask of you is perhaps a list of other qualified candidates, men you’ve personally known who you feel might be able to assume the mission’s requirements.”
Wentz’s resolve began to bow, then it collapsed altogether. He rationalized, of course, manipulated the proposition around his promise like a sculptor covering up a flaw with a last-minute slap of clay.
He wasn’t going to accept the mission…
I’m just going to check it out. What’s the harm in that?
“All right,” Wentz agreed.
“Outstanding,” Rainier said. “Squared away.”
Wentz came to attention, saluted but Rainier just waved a lazy hand. “I told you, forget about all that. If I have to return one more salute, my goddamn arm’s going to fall off. Colonel Ashton?”
The woman moved forward, a perfumed shadow. “Get your flight gear on, General Wentz. There’s an F-15 waiting for us on Taxiway Six. On afterburners, we should be in Nevada in about fifty minutes.”
Wentz scoffed. “With me flying? Try forty.”
—
CHAPTER 6
Static crackled on the headset. “Romeo One this is Boxcars One. Request permission to…” Wentz paused. Why should he care about proper commo protocol anymore? “Request permission to open this fucker up to the max and get the fuck out of here.”
A chuckle through the static. “Permission affirmed, Boxcars One. You are clear for take-off. When you melt the runway, we’ll send you a bill.”
“Good luck making me pay, Romeo One. Adios…”
Taking off on afterburners was close to impossible—but not for Wentz. You just had to know how to jink the throttle in tandem with the azimuth. The $40,000,000 plane didn’t take off as much as it exploded off T-D Runway 4. Wentz wasn’t fifty feet off the asphalt when he pulled into a full barrel-spin and was burning upward at nearly a forty-five-degree line. They were a cockscrew soaring straight up.
Wentz watched the heavens revolve in the polycarb canopy: the world was a bright spinning top. Ashton shrieked like a cat on fire.
“Stop it! Stop it! I’m going to—”
Wentz leveled off with a single quick jerk of the stick. In one second, the plane was flying flat and smooth, roaring westward, the sun beaming above the sky.
He could hear Ashton gasping in his commo set. “You okay, Colonel?”
A few more gasps, then the otherwise reserved Colonel Ashton shouted, “Look, I’m not into this fighter-jock macho crap, damn you! Fly the plane normal!”
“I thought that’s what I was doing,” Wentz miked back to her. “Tighten your stomach muscles. I’ll show you normal.” More finesse on the stick, and the plane’s wings were perpendicular to the earth as he pulled into a 4-G climb.
“Stop it! Stop it!” she shrieked. “Please!”
Guess it’s time to stop being a dickhead, Wentz considered. He leveled off again. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I just thought you’d want to experience an official takeoff record. We just climbed to 58,000 feet in one minute. That’s a record for this aircraft. Now you’ve got something to tell your grandkids.”
Ashton sat behind Wentz, in what would otherwise be the Bear’s Seat, or the EWO seat—electronic warfare officer. This F-15M2-series was a courier version: minimal AV bay, no ECM pod, no General Electric M61 gun. It was stripped, in other words, all business. Two seats sitting on top of two modified Pratt-Whitney dual-shaft turbofans rated 40,000 pounds of zero-mean thrust apiece. The fuel-burn-rating was classified, and so was the plane’s top speed: mach three-point-one. The only thing that struck him as odd was the paint scheme: flat Khaki paint, solid, like the color of sand.
“I almost…peed myself!” Ashton shouted through her mike. “I don’t care if you’re the best pilot in the world! Don’t do anymore of that shit!”
Wentz winced at the word. “Colonel? If I may make a personal observation? Somehow, hearing the word shit come out of your mouth…well, it doesn’t become you.”
“Fuck off!”
Neither does that, Wentz thought. “I apologize, Colonel. I’m just having a little last-minute fun. After tomorrow, I’ll never be flying this fast again.”
An exhalation over the wire somehow sounded coy. “Still don’t think you’ll take the mission?”
“Positive. Rainier was playing me for a fool, so I thought I’d return the favor. Thought I’d take the opportunity to drive an Eagle one more time, at his expense. Whatever this mission is, I ain’t taking it.”
The coyness left her voice. Now she sounded dead serious. “Don’t be too sure.”
Wentz cut his afterburners when the temp needle was about to max. “All right, let’s forget about keeping a jackass in suspense. Tell me the mission.”
“No way, sir. You need to see for yourself, just like General Rainier said.”
“Eee-haw, eee-haw,” Wentz said. “And by the way, what’s with the funky paint on the plane?”
“You’ll see.”
Great answer. “Okay, but if you don’t mind my asking, what’s an… attractive… woman like you doing in all this super-secret classified security clearance bullshit?”
“You know something, General? Even Farrington wasn’t as sexist as you.”
“Sexist!” Wentz objected. “Where’d that come from?”
“Most of you guys? Jesus. Because you’re so maladjusted and unsocialized, you pull these macho big-stud pilot antics. You think that turns a woman on. You think women melt when they see a hardline test pilot in uniform. Well, let me tell you something, General. I’ve met a lot of pilots in this business, and every single one of them has been an egotistical self-absorbed high-on-himself asshole.”
Wentz chuckled. “Then I’m glad I haven’t disappointed you, Colonel.”
“Boxcars One, this is Romeo One. Do you read?”
“Roger,” Wentz answered. “Is there a problem?”
“No problem, Boxcars One. We just wanted to let you know that our planar-array WLR confirms that you just set an official climb record for an aircraft of your designated thrust-rating.”
“Roger, Romeo One. Tell me something I don’t already know. Boxcars One, out.” Wentz smiled. “See?” he miked back to Ashton. “I told you.”