A click of his thumb activated the intercom. “How ya doin’?”
Cate sat beside him in her own self-enclosed turret, his airsick RIO, or radar intercept officer, in her sky blue flight suit and pearl white helmet. “Alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”
“We’re about eleven hundred miles out,” he said. “Another two hours and we’ll be on friendly soil.”
“Just hurry, Jett.”
Cate had greeted the initial rush of speed with an exhilarated “Wow!” and then, a few seconds later, as they’d slowed dramatically, a less enthusiastic “Uh-oh.” She’d used two of Grushkin’s doggy bags, and Gavallan didn’t think there was anything left in her tummy for a third.
“I am,” he said. “You can count on it.”
Gavallan released his thumb and turned his eyes back to the bank of instruments. He’d expected it to be easier than this. He’d expected it all to come right back, as if sliding into the cockpit after an eleven-year break were the same thing as slipping on an old jacket and finding that it still fit. Instead, the seat felt tight on his bottom. The cockpit was much too small, the stick unresponsive. It wasn’t a question of whether he could still fly. He could. The Mig was not especially challenging in that regard. The cockpit configuration was similar to that of the A-10 he’d piloted prior to going into the Stealth program. Aircraft design dictated that form follow function and the throttle, stick, and navigation systems were all in similar places. The gauges and the heads-up display, or HUD, with their Cyrillic lettering might be difficult to read and the airspeed indicator was in kilometers, not knots per hour, but when it came down to it, the Mig was just another jet. All the same, he was flying poorly, stiffly, with no grace, no feel for the aircraft. Even the familiar tightness of the G suit around his thighs and across his stomach, the shoulder harness’s stiff bite, failed to comfort him.
Relax, he told himself. You were born to do this. Born to fly.
The words set him on a slingshot journey back through time in which he reviewed his every accomplishment as a pilot. Baghdad. Tonopah. Colorado Springs. The images shot past his mind’s eye with increasing speed, faster and faster, one on top of the other, blurred, ill-focused, until just as quickly they froze and he saw himself at age fifteen, lying on the hood of his father’s Chevy on a hot summer night in Texas. The car was a hot rod, a fire engine red ’68 Camaro with a 454 engine, twin chrome exhausts, and a white racing stripe painted down the hood. After spending all afternoon washing and waxing it, he’d driven twenty miles outside of town and parked in the middle of the open plain where alone in the gathering dusk, he could watch the jets from Beeville Air Station, fifty miles to the north, screech across the sky. He would lie there for an hour, looking up at their gleaming silver bodies, listening to their engines shake the very pillars of the sky, dreaming upon the white contrails they left behind. He was born to fly. It had come to him with a certainty that was raw and cold and frightening. Shivering in the ninety-nine-degree dusk, he’d known he belonged up there.
So, fly, he told himself now. Relax and fly, goddamn it.
He gazed at the countryside below. The sun had fallen below the horizon, and its waning rays burnt the Earth’s cusp a flaming ochre. The sky above was dark and supple and inviting.
Gavallan’s eyes fell to the radar array, a square black screen six inches by six inches located on the instrument console. The screen was dark except for his own orange blip and a flashing triangle that was a passenger jet ninety miles to the north. He’d been flying for an hour, and so far he had detected no sign of Russian air patrols. Either Grushkin was a man of his word or Russian air defenses were perilously lax.
Checking his coordinates on the heads-up satellite navigation system, he put the plane into a seventy-degree roll and brought his heading to west-southwest. Doing some quick math, he figured he’d put the bird down at Ramstein Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt at around 10 P.M. local time. From then on, they’d be living on the good graces of others.
Five minutes passed. Gavallan checked his coordinates against a map on his knee and decided he was somewhere just south of Kraców, Poland, safely out of Russian airspace. “We’re going to start looking mighty suspicious to our flyboys anytime now,” he said to Cate. “Time to call ahead and give the boys in blue our arrival time.” He checked his radio log and dialed in Ramstein Air Force Base, home to the 86th Airlift Wing. As he keyed the mike a second time, a steady howl sounded outside his earphones. At the same time, a red square blinked on his console. Fire. Starboard engine. His eyes kicked right. The gauge showing the exhaust gas temperature was maxed out, full in the red. He pulled the handle to activate the fire extinguisher and cut fuel flow to the engine. At the same time, he cut back on the throttle, shut down the engine, and put the plane into a steep dive. A check over his shoulder revealed nothing. But the gauge didn’t lie.
The plane shuddered, as if hit from the side.
“Jett!”
“Hold on, sweetheart, just a little problem.”
“What is it?”
Gavallan’s heart was racing; a lump lodged high in his throat. The stick was bucking in his hand. He jerked it to the right, but there was no response. A high-pitched buzz saw whined in his earphones. He was losing control of the aircraft.
This isn’t my plane, he protested silently. I haven’t trained in a Mig. A second check over his shoulder showed flames licking the wing. Immediately he hit the auxiliary extinguisher, and a gust of white puffed from beneath the wing. The flames flickered, then disappeared.
And then the world turned upside down on him. The Mig rolled over and went nose down, spinning in a slow roll.
“Jett, help us. Stop this. Oh, God… no, no!”
Gavallan looked at Cate, her eyes wide with terror, her helmet pinned to the canopy.
A voice inside him whispered, You were born to fly. So, relax and fly.
“Just a little glitch,” he said, in the voice Grafton Byrnes had taught him that hot and sunny day in Alamagordo. “Not to worry.”
Still inverted, he pulled back on the stick, depressed the ailerons to stop the spin, and pulled the nose through. Gently he goosed the port engine. The single turbine hummed confidently. It was working. The plane was responding to his touch. He was guiding the aircraft instead of allowing it to guide him. A well of confidence grew in his chest, warm and reassuring. It was the pilot’s bravado coming back. The certainty he could do anything, if by sheer force of will alone.
And there, as he plummeted toward the earth at four hundred miles an hour, a dam burst in his mind. A clarity of thought, of memory, of action, came to him that he had not possessed for years.
Priority One. Ring One.
The words struck him like a lightning bolt.
The attack on Abu Ghurayb. Saddam’s Presidential palace.
He saw himself in the cockpit of the F-117—no, damn it, he is there… the stick between his legs, the joystick to his left, the infrared display screens. He is there. Inside Darling Lil, ten thousand feet above the Iraqi desert.
He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles a switch. Bomb armed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. His finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red lights fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the pickle and the weapons bay door opens. Darling Lil shudders. He depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. He feels the aircraft jerk upward, as if freed from its moorings.