William H. Lovejoy
Phantom Strike
DEDICATION
The State of Nebraska does have some positive traits, and the most positive is its people.
This novel is dedicated to some extremely nice and talented Nebraska people: Doug Bereuter, Rich Bringelson, Anne Campbell, Chris Christofferson, Bill Colwell, Jim Exon, Roger Flanders, Dorset Graves, Chuck Harrington, Murl Mauser, Ed Nelson, Ward Reesman, Larry Tangeman, Gerry Vasholz, Dave Wagaman, Bob Walker, Jerry Warner
And in memoriam, Henry Ley and George Rebensdorf.
I consider myself fortunate to have been associated with, and to learn from, all of them at one period in my life.
Resurrection
One
From a half-mile away, the birds still looked proud, sleek, and capable. The mid-morning Arizona sun glanced white-hot off shiny aluminium and titanium panels and stabbed the eyes of observers. Wavery heat made the earth quiver in the far distance.
In the lead Jeep, Andy Wyatt backhanded the sweat from his forehead and fished his sunglasses from the breast pocket of his tan, knit sport shirt. The Polaroids killed the glare and gave him a more dismal view.
As they approached the first group of aircraft, Air Force Captain Owen Dinning, who was driving, slowed the Jeep to thirty miles an hour. Dinning was a fair-haired, smiley young man who displayed easy deference to his visitors. In the real, non-military world, he would have a business address on Madison Avenue. He was following one of the asphalt roads that crisscrossed the aircraft park and delineated half-mile-long checkerboard squares. Within the squares, the sagebrush and weeds had been killed off with some defoliant, leaving sun-baked soil that was the colour of spilled tea.
Behind them, a flight of F-15s took off from the air base with a roar that rumbled forever across the flat desert. Wyatt’s eyes followed the two fighters as they banked away toward the Saguaro National Monument, then nosed upward and climbed steeply to the north.
Live airplanes interested Andy Wyatt far more than did dead ones.
He gazed solemnly at the aircraft they were passing. They appeared frozen to the earth, and he was certain that many of them should have been entombed.
The amiable Captain Dinning flipped a thumb at the behemoths broiling in the sun on their left. “Sure you don’t want a BUFF, Mr. Wyatt?”
BUFF. Big, Ugly, Fat Fucker. The scourge of Hanoi. In the course of the war games in Southeast Asia, the B-52s had dropped more ordnance tonnage on North Vietnam than was expended in all of World War II. The daily pounding of the capital city was enough to drive any nation into mania and submission, but something was wrong with the strategy.
Hanoi won.
Viewed from up close, these B-52s saddened Wyatt. There were over a hundred of them parked in long rows. They were forlorn and neglected. Paint and insignia were peeling; metal skin was tarnished; tires were flattened; control surfaces were missing; Plexiglas was grazed and cracked. Most of them had empty engine nacelles, their turbojets scavenged for other uses. He knew that most of them would have had their radar and avionics stripped out. Stacks of debris — drop tanks, pylons, access panels — littered the ground beneath the wings. In the second row over, a blue pickup was parked in the shade of one of the giant swept wings, and two technicians were busy performing a surgical removal of something somebody somewhere needed on one of the forty-year-old bombers.
The design was forty years old, but the B-52 was still one of the mainstays of the Air Force, with 165 G- and H-model aircraft in active service. It said something subtle but powerful about the design.
“I think I’ll pass,” Wyatt told his driver.
“You don’t look too happy, sir.”
“If I were running this air force, I’d strip the damned things, then melt them down.”
“Maybe we’ll need them again?” the captain suggested.
“It’d cost more to rebuild one today than Boeing billed the taxpayer originally, Captain.”
“That’s true, sir.”
Andrew Wyatt did not like viewing the mothball fleet at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Supposedly, the thousands of aircraft were being held in reserve, but realistically, most would never fly again. The skeletons neatly scattered over this sandy acreage were a highly visible tribute to obsolescence, an expensive symbol of American waste, Air Force style.
Dinning slowed, downshifted, and spun the wheel to the right at the next intersection. They passed ghettos of Lockheed C-121 Constellations, P-2 Neptunes, a few Electras, some Martin B-57 Night Intruders, Grumman Albatross amphibians, and F-101 Super Sabres. On a faraway plot, Wyatt saw a few golden oldies: B-17s, B-36s, a crippled Mustang.
Wyatt looked behind him. The other Jeep was keeping pace. Bucky Barr waved at him, his big, horsey teeth revealing his glee. Barr got a kick out of almost anything, but his exuberance did not pass to Wyatt. It was not only this traipse through avian tombstones that depressed him. The coming weeks carried the very real possibility that he would be buying memorial markers for some people he liked.
Captain Dinning dropped to second gear, bounced off the hard surface of the asphalt, and raced between the first two rows of what had to be over two hundred F-4 Phantoms. The second Jeep pulled up alongside them, to get out of the mini-cloud of dust Dinning raised.
Wyatt’s guide found his clipboard in the space between the seats, checked the top sheet, and began to scan the tail numbers of the fighters. Halfway down the first row, he braked to a stop, and the tech sergeant driving the other vehicle skidded to a stop next to them.
“Here’s the first one, Mr. Cowan.”
“E model?” Wyatt asked, responding to the name he was using.
“Yes, sir. One of the dozen we’ve got. Most of the retirements here are B, C, and D models. Anything later is still in service, usually with the air reserves. A lot of them, all models, have been sold to friendly governments.”
Wyatt swung his legs out of the footwell and stood up. The desert dust immediately coated the spit-shine of his Wellington boots. His chino slacks had had a crease in them at seven o’clock when he pulled them on in his motel room, but the crease was blurred now by heat and perspiration. His shirt felt sticky. Wyatt had big, muscled shoulders and arms, and the damp shirt acted as if it were part of his skin, another dermal layer.
Barr, Demion, and Kriswell slipped out of the other Jeep, and joined him in front of the Phantom’s snout. They were dressed casually also, fighting the dry heat with jeans, sport shirts, and running shoes. The tech sergeant was in wilted fatigues, and Dinning, in summer Class As, was the only one who appeared fresh. In his Air Force days, Wyatt had known commanders like Dinning, who seemed immune to the elements.
The six of them stood there silently for a moment and looked at the airplane.
“I don’t see any dents,” Bucky Barr noted.
“Maybe they used bondo on it?” Jim Demion said.
“Whatever they used, it’s still pretty,” Kriswell told them.
Despite the technological advances made with Eagles, Tomcats, and Hornets, the F-4 was still a lethal-looking airplane. It was also a reliable craft, Wyatt knew. Over five thousand had been built, one of the highest production records ever for a fighter aircraft. Only the MiG-21 could boast the same numbers. The Phantom first flew in 1958, and its combat record in Vietnam, flown by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines, was commendable.
The huge, ovoid air intakes on each side of the fuselage gave the craft added mass from the head-on view. The outer wing panels were canted upward in a dihedral angle, a counterpoint to the steep, twenty-three-degree anhedral droop of the rear tailplanes. This Phantom was missing its external fuel tanks, and the two wing-mounted weapons pylons which normally sprouted four Sidewinder missiles were bare, The underside was finished in dull white paint, and the fuselage and top surfaces were coated in the most recent scheme of matte olive, green, and tan camouflage colours. The ID was for the 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron which, as far as Wyatt knew, was still operating out of Europe.