The F-111 was three miles northeast of Lakenheath when it dropped below the clouds. Shepherd smiled at the sight of the runway lights winking in the mist.
“Coming onto short final, Al,” he said to Brancato, who was slumped in his couch, his head against the canopy. “Al? Al, how many E’s in Beethoven?”
Brancato grunted unintelligibly.
“Come on, Alfredo, don’t die on me now.”
“Viper-Two, we have you on short,” the SOF said over the radio. “Let’s cover the boldface.”
“Roger,” Shepherd replied, coolly.
“Blow in doors closed.”
“Affirm.”
“Wing sweep at sixteen.”
“Sixteen.”
“Emergency extension on gear.”
Shepherd pulled the release. Compressed air from an emergency reservoir charged the system at 3,000 psi, blowing down the nose and main landing gear. His eyes darted to the position indicator lamps, which had just come on, informing him both were down and locked.
“Two greens,” he reported with relief.
“Verify green,” the SOF echoed. “Slats down.”
“Affirm.”
“Flaps down at twenty-five.”
“Flaps down; two-five.”
“Tail hook down.”
Shepherd reached to the yellow and black striped handle in the corner of the instrument panel and pulled hard. The arrester hook blew down at an angle from a fairing beneath the tail, the trailing end hanging several feet lower than the landing gear. Like many military fighters, not only those deployed on carriers, all F-111s had an arrester hook for emergency landings.
His eyes were riveted to the instrumentation now, monitoring angle of attack, sink rate, and air speed, which he kept at 160 knots—30 ks faster than landing with both engines — as the bomber came in at an angle against the blustery crosswinds. The tail hook touched down first; it dragged along the concrete, sending a rooster tail of blue-purple titanium sparks shooting into the darkness from below the F-111’s empennage.
Shepherd set the main gear of the 50,000-pound bomber on the ground with featherlike delicacy, then dropped the nose. The plane began rocketing brakeless down the 10,000-foot runway at 160 knots. It had traveled about 1,000 feet when in an eyeblink — bump-bump-wham! — the tires rolled over the inch-thick, braided steel cable and the arrester hook snagged it. A screaming whine rose from pits on either side of the runway as the cable unspooled from immense reels connected to a centrifugal clutch that absorbed the kinetic energy and brought the plane to a stop.
Ambulances and emergency fire fighting equipment were already racing toward it, their roof flashers sending splashes of colored light across the runway, their headlights serving to illuminate the area as they encircled the bomber.
A flight surgeon and several nurses clambered aboard a hydraulic platform with their equipment. It reached cockpit level just as Shepherd popped the canopies and released Brancato’s flight harness; he was pale and unconscious.
The surgeon dove beneath the blood-spattered Plexiglas, and cut away the shoulder of his flight suit, exposing the wound. “Prepare a bag of LRs and give me two grams of Monocid,” he said; then, taking the syringe, he shot the antibiotic into Brancato’s thigh.
Shepherd assisted in lifting him from the flight couch onto a gurney on the platform. It began descending immediately. One of the nurses wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Brancato’s bicep. The other hung a 1,000 cc bag of Lactated Ringers on the gurney, uncapped the IV needle, and slipped it into a vein in his forearm.
The platform bottomed out with a gentle thump.
In one continuous motion, they rolled the gurney off the edge, across the tarmac, and into an ambulance.
Shepherd watched it speed off into the darkness; then he glanced apprehensively at the technicians swarming over his plane.
“Major Shepherd?” a voice called out.
He turned to see two men approaching; one was a master sergeant he correctly assumed was a crew chief; the other, a broad-shouldered fellow with a friendly face and lumbering stride, was an officer.
“We’ll have her patched and on the flight line ASAP, sir,” the crew chief offered. “Long as you’re okay…”
“I’m fine. Thanks. I’d like to call my wife.”
“There’s no need for concern, Major,” the officer replied, taking charge. “Andrews has been notified of your status. I’m sure she’s been informed,” he went on in a high-pitched voice that was poorly matched to his big frame and gregarious demeanor; then he shook Shepherd’s hand and introduced himself. “Major Applegate, military intelligence. I’ll be debriefing you.”
That same afternoon in Washington, D.C., Stephanie Shepherd hurried across Independence Avenue toward the Rayburn Office Building, a banal, gargantuan edifice opposite the Capitol. She had trouble finding a parking place and was late.
Representative James Gutherie’s office was on the third floor. A nine-term congressman and ranking member of the House Intelligence and Oversight committees, he made two stops on his way to the Hill every morning: the first at Georgetown Rehabilitation Center to see his wife; the second at Holy Trinity R.C. Church on 35th Street to pray for her recovery.
Both avid skiers, the Gutheries first met on a chairlift at Killington. Twenty-five years later, the sport that had brought them together tore them apart. It was a low-speed fall, and there wasn’t a scratch on her, but his wife had been in a coma ever since.
The congressman had been a failed Catholic for years. The day the doctors said her recovery was in God’s hands, Gutherie went back to church; the day the polls revealed he had fallen behind his opponent, he began praying for two miracles.
Stephanie hurried from the elevator and down the endless corridors, long auburn hair flying behind her, turning several male heads in the process, which pleased her.
The congressman’s suite was a beehive. Phones rang incessantly. Harried staffers crisscrossed the reception area. The door to Gutherie’s office opened and a towering, ruggedly handsome man came toward her.
“Stephanie,” Jim Gutherie said, smiling. He hugged her as if they’d been close friends for years, letting his head fill with her perfume.
“Mr. Congressman, good to see you,” she replied stiffly as she disengaged. “Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s what you said the last time,” he teased.
“That’s not what I hoped you’d remember about me.” She had interviewed him during his reelection campaign two years ago, and was feeling more surprised that he had remembered than embarrassed.
“What’s somebody who can’t make deadlines doing as a reporter, anyway?”
“Beats me. The pay’s an insult, the pressure ages you, and congressmen only remember your faults.”
Gutherie broke into a hearty chuckle and showed her into his office. His opponent had been using his work on the Oversight Committee to imply he was antidefense and the congressman wanted to remind his 20,000-plus constituents who lived and worked at Andrews of his votes for military pay hikes and defense appropriations. They were halfway through the interview when his secretary reminded him of an appointment. “VFW luncheon,” he said to Stephanie with a facetious scowl. “Wouldn’t want to miss one of those.”
“It’s going to take a lot more than that this time, isn’t it?” Stephanie declared, suddenly serious, detecting he had lost his taste for battle.
“Tough one,” Gutherie admitted, lowering his guard. “I’ll have my secretary get in touch to reschedule.” He placed a hand on Stephanie’s shoulder and guided her to the door. “Maybe we can do it over lunch?” he suggested, his palm sliding to the small of her back, remaining longer than she thought appropriate.