Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean
‘Pig one, behind Jaguar on short final line-up,’ instructed the tower.
Lieutenant Pete Crawford ran his eye along the eight temperature gauges monitoring the Pratt and Whitney TF33-P-3/103 turbofans, and found them to be in the green. He glanced up as the Royal Air Force Jaguar’s main gear kissed the threshold markers, flashing through their landing lights. Crawford then followed it down the threekilometre runway until it disappeared into the night. Diego Garcia was a British possession but they shared it with the Americans. The Brits were fair pilots and everyone got on well enough. They loved their ‘pints’, as they called them. Hell, aside from the odd pint, there wasn’t much else to do on the tiny island, unless you liked to fish, which Crawford didn’t.
‘Okay, Pete, let’s get this show on the road,’ said Colonel Zeke Chapman, the aircraft’s commander sitting on his left, bringing Crawford out of his daydream.
‘Roger that, sir,’ said Crawford.
The two men eased the throttle levers between them forward and the engine note rose to a shriek. The B-52 moved off the holding marks and swung onto the runway.
‘Pig one. Lining up behind the Jaguar,’ said Crawford.
‘Pig one, you are cleared for takeoff.’
‘Pig one,’ said Crawford automatically, repeating the aircraft’s callsign, confirming that the clearance was received.
Crawford and Chapman pushed the throttles forward to the stops, harnessing the turbofans’ full one hundred and thirty-six thousand pounds of thrust. The Big Ugly Fat Fucker, or BUFF as the type was affectionately known, quickly gathered speed, its massive tyres thumping into the runway’s section joints, slowly at first and then faster as it roared along, eating up the broken centre line. There was a full load of fuel aboard but the bomb bays were empty. The digits on the air speed indicator climbed rapidly, all-up weight around one hundred and fifty thousand kilograms and well within the aircraft’s maximum for takeoff.
‘Rotate,’ said Chapman when one hundred and forty-five knots was indicated on the multifunction glass screen.
Crawford pulled back on the wheel and the aircraft’s nose rose off the pavement. The air speed continued to climb as the main gear left the earth and the colonel pulled up on the lever, retracting it. ‘Flaps, twenty-five,’ Crawford said. This was the perfect training flight. ‘Flaps, ten,’ he said, retracting them further. A seven-and-a-half-hour turnaround with a delivery in the middle.
‘Pig one, turning left,’ said the colonel to the tower as they climbed through a thousand feet. He nodded at Crawford who put the aircraft into a gentle thirty-five degree turn. Standard departure procedure. They’d fly down the runway’s dead side for ten miles, gaining altitude, then set a course for the north-east.
‘Flaps zero,’ said Crawford. The long actuating screws whined until a gentle bump transmitted through the airframe signified that the flaps were seated snugly at their stops; a warning light on the instrument panel winked off and confirmed the fact.
‘Like spreading peanut butter, Pete,’ said the electronic warfare officer, a captain, sitting behind them.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Crawford over his shoulder as he again verified fuel pressures and engine temps. All normal. He then cycled through the various modes displayed by the cockpit screens, mentally ticking off the information presented. As the aircraft climbed through ten thousand feet, a bright orange rind appeared, marking the edge of the world, a band of fire in the sea. They were flying at an oblique angle towards the sun, at a ground speed of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. It would rise above the edge of the world within minutes — much sooner than if they were back on DG. Crawford was happy to be sitting between night and day with a long flight ahead of him. As a matter of interest, he called up the weapons stores on the interface shared with the radar navigator sitting on the lower deck. The display revealed that the stores were empty except for three joint stand-off weapons — JSOWs — occupying external pods under the wings.
‘Heading one-four-three climbing to flight level threefive zero,’ said the voice of the navigator in his ’phones.
‘Do it manual, son,’ the colonel said to Crawford. ‘Feel what it’s like to fondle a forty-year-old mistress.’
Crawford kept the BUFF’s flight management computer out of the loop and flew the aircraft onto the navigator’s course, marvelling again at what a sweet old girl the B-52 was.
Nam Sa River, Myanmar
The BK-117 Eurocopter had civilian markings and was flying a logged civilian flight plan but, being part of the CIA’s air wing, the aircraft was not exactly what it seemed. It had been modified. If the situation called for it, a Browning .50 calibre machine gun hidden away in a floor locker could be lifted out, mounted on a sling and fired through the side opening by the co-pilot. But apart from the Browning, Wilkes, Monroe and Federal Agent Jenny Tadzic were going in unarmed. Wilkes and Monroe were uncomfortable about it but that had been a condition of entry stipulated by their host.
‘There comes a point when you have to shrug and say, “What the fuck?” ’ Wilkes had said to Atticus when the discussion became heated. The what-the-fuck point had definitely been reached and Wilkes was in charge, so that was that. Their safety was in the lap of the gods — that and good timing. At least they had the Browning. As far as Wilkes was concerned, worse than being unarmed was that they were wearing civilian clothes rather than fatigues — jeans and T-shirts. It was like going to work naked.
The jungle slid by underneath in a series of ridgelines that stretched towards the horizon, a green sea with mountainous waves. The landscape had a familiarity about it. It reminded Wilkes of jungles from North Queensland to West Papua to Vietnam; different borders, customs, governments and problems, all of which meant nothing to this giant living band of greenery.
The helo made a course change that Wilkes felt in the muscles of his neck, to bring it low and slow over the targeted cultivated field. It was still deserted and Wilkes breathed a sigh of relief. The aircraft swung around to the right and descended into a narrow valley. The ground rose slowly to meet them as the valley broadened. And suddenly they scudded low over a vast walled compound crowned by an extraordinary building that reminded Wilkes of a Hollywood-style Roman villa: Jed Clampett’s house from The Beverly Hillbillies. He smiled at that, and began to quietly whistle the show’s theme song.
The rotors beat the air with a thump as the helo climbed into a hundred and eighty degree turn and decelerated. Goddam chopper pilots. Wilkes had never met one that didn’t like making an entrance. The helo flared and then lowered gradually onto its skids. Wilkes and Monroe hopped out, followed by Tadzic. They quickly made their way beyond the flickering circle carved by the helo’s rotors. The pilot gave them the thumbs up and then the helo was gone, climbing rapidly towards the ridge above the valley and then dropping behind it.
‘Welcome to my humble house.’
Wilkes, Monroe and Tadzic turned. The greeting came from a fat man with heavily rouged cheeks dressed in jungle greens. He was sitting atop a magnificent white horse chewing at its bit. A couple of Humvees squealed to a halt behind the horse, bristling with soldiers armed with a variety of weapons. The men swarmed out of the vehicles shouting and yelling as they ran. The soldiers snatched Wilkes’s backpack and then forced the three of them onto their stomachs and patted them down for weapons.