“Want to kick the tires, Mr. B?” Wyatt asked, being careful to avoid true names, deceiving his country, and as far as that went, his air force.
Barr grinned at him. “Hell, yes. I’m a tire-kicker from way back. Salesmen hate me.”
“That’s because you flatten the tires when you kick them,” Kriswell said.
Nelson Buckingham Barr, III, was a solid chunk of a man, his physique akin to that of many boulders Wyatt had seen alongside Rocky Mountain highways. It had always seemed to Wyatt that someone had invented a giant shoehorn solely for the purpose of wedging Barr into fighter cockpits. He was five-feet, nine-inches tall, but his breadth gave him solidity.
Tom Kriswell, the electronics engineer/magician, was a foot taller than Barr and half as wide. He spoke to Dinning. “When was it brought in, Captain?”
Dinning checked his clipboard. “Three months ago, on April seventh.”
“Flown in? Not transported?”
“Under her own power, sir.”
“Suppose it’s still got electrical power?”
“If they haven’t pulled the batteries yet, we can give it a try,” Dinning told him.
Dinning, Kriswell, and Jim Demion, Wyatt’s aeronautical engineer, approached the side of the plane. Kriswell found the recessed control for the forward canopy and played with it. With a reluctant slurp of the rubber seals, the canopy began to raise. It was a slow process, attesting to the depleted condition of the batteries.
The tech sergeant got a ladder from the back of Dinning’s Jeep, brought it over, and hooked it over the cockpit coaming. Kriswell scampered up the rungs with agility surprising in such a long and lean body, checked the safety pin on the ejection seat, swung his skinny legs inboard, and dropped into the seat.
Jim Demion began a circuit of the aircraft, sticking his head up into landing gear retraction wells, testing control surfaces, peering up the tail pipes of the twin J79-GE-17 turbojets. He popped the Dzus fasteners on access hatches, swung them open, and poked around in the innards. He came around to the front of the airplane and removed the protective covers on the air intakes.
Bucky Barr kicked the port side tire.
Kriswell tossed Wyatt the aircraft maintenance log, which had been stored in the cockpit.
“What have you got up there, Tom?” Wyatt asked.
“Not much. I’ve got power on the instrument panel, but not enough amperage to check radios or radar.”
Wyatt took the log back to the Jeep. He sat on the passenger’s seat and slowly read through it, making his own notes in the black leather notebook he carried in his hip pocket. This Phantom had been built in 1975 and had therefore missed the Vietnam festivities. The airframe had over forty thousand hours on it, but both of the General Electric turbojets had been changed out and now had eleven thousand hours on them. They would have to be rebuilt to achieve the reliability he wanted. The craft sported a Tiseo zoom-lens video system which enhanced the pilot’s visual target-tracking. None of the F-4s featured Head Up Displays, but this machine did have the advanced sight system. It was computer-based and made interception and air or ground weapons delivery more accurate. The newer APQ-120 fire control radar was installed, as well as the additional fuel cell in the rear fuselage. That gave it a sixteen-hundred-mile ferry range.
Jim Demion sauntered back to the Jeep and waited for his turn at the log.
Their inspection took forty minutes.
When they were done, standing in a half-circle around the forlorn airplane, Wyatt asked, “Anybody have questions for the captain?”
There were none, but then the captain was not an airman, anyway.
“Okay,” Wyatt said, “let’s take a look at the next one, Captain Dinning.”
At the next Phantom, Wyatt pulled Demion aside, out of earshot of Dinning and the tech sergeant. “What do you think, Jim? Are these old bastards going to work for us?”
“It’s the best thing we’ve got going, Andy.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. We’re going up against damned sophisticated weapons systems. I don’t want bodies all over the landscape when it’s over.”
“We talking our bodies?”
“They’re the ones uppermost in my mind, Jim.”
“Go back to what we talked about before, Andy. The opposition’s systems may be state-of-the-art, but keep telling yourself about the people behind them. They’re assholes, remember?”
“Maybe. But assholes are conditioned to react instinctively.”
“Just be cool, boss. When Kriswell and I are done, those aero-fucking-planes will be things of beauty. Venus de Milo, step aside.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what they look like,” Wyatt told him.
“But Bucky does,” Kriswell said.
Barr had demanded, and received, responsibility for cosmetic changes. It would, he said, keep him out of the innards where he was all thumbs, anyway.
In four hours, the team looked over the three F-4Es, four F-4Ds, and one C model. By one o’clock, the sun was delivering temperatures above one hundred degrees, and probably much more than that on the barren surfaces of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base’s “Boneyard.”
“I’m hungry,” Barr said.
“That doesn’t tell us anything,” Kriswell said. “You’re always hungry.”
“I’m tired of kicking tires. Let’s play airplane tomorrow, and go back to the motel now.”
“If you start walking now,” Wyatt grinned at him, “you’ll make Tucson by the time we’re done.”
“Shit. How come I always get hooked up with a bunch of workaholics?”
“Do you want to see a couple more, Mr. Cowan?” Dinning asked.
“We’re about Phantomed out, I think. Let’s look at that 130F now.”
They all got back in the blue Air Force Jeeps and drove about three miles to where a C-130 Hercules was parked. The Lockheed C-130 transports, born in 1951, were operational airplanes still in production and utilized globally by a dozen governments and some private enterprises. It was a competent workhorse, and Wyatt already owned one that he had committed to this project.
This single Hercules condemned to mothballs was a one of a kind, designated a KC-130F. It had been an experiment in converting the Hercules to the role of aerial tanker in the normal, designated way of military contracts and design, though Wyatt had heard stories about jury-rigged C-130 tankers created on the spot in Vietnam. By the Marines, probably, since they were expert at Rube Goldberg devices. Apparently, the Air Force had decided to stick with their larger, jet-engined tankers because this aircraft log showed very little time on the four Allison turboprops. After a short reconnaissance trip around, and inside, the aircraft, both Demion and Kriswell appeared satisfied.
Back on the main grounds of the base at three o’clock, Captain Dinning lost the tech sergeant and took them into the officer’s club for a sandwich and a beer.
“Jesus! Air-conditioning. I’d forgotten what it was like.” Barr picked at his yellow Izod shirt with thumb and forefingers like a dainty dilettante, tugging it away from a chest as hairy as a brown bear’s. He took off his Pebble Beach golf cap and wrung it out.
“Your upbringing left something to be desired,” Demion told him.
“Like what?”