After that, the young black man lost his enthusiasm for football and turned to his studies. Eventually, he was cut from the team and lost his athletic scholarship. But the Air Force offered him another one in ROTC, and with student loans he was able to graduate. Once in the Air Force, less than perfect eyesight kept him out of pilot training and led him into navigator training. Thunder found flying and the Air Force deeply rewarding. He mounted a well-thought-out attack on navigator training and graduated at the top of his class, sweeping every honor the program had to offer. He was not surprised when he was assigned to F-4s, his first choice.
The young officer found a home in the fighter community and rapidly developed into the best WSO in his wing. When the Air Force asked for volunteers to open the base in Egypt, he jumped at the chance, instinctively aware of the opportunities that existed in a new unit. Three things happened to him at Alexandria South: he made captain, met Jack, and learned how to play. Out of desperation, Mike Fairly teamed Thunder with Jack, hoping the WSO could control the young lieutenant. It was a perfect match. Thunder was able to curb most of Jack’s impulsive behavior and Jack taught Thunder how to relax and have some fun.
Jack kissed the girl good-bye near the alert area’s parking lot and sprinted back to the chief’s trailer, bursting through the door. “Coffee, amigo?” he asked the crew chief.
“Later,” Thunder told him. “Maintenance is switching the alert birds. It’s preflight time. Tail number is 512.”
Jack faked a groan and headed out the door with the same enthusiasm as when he entered.
“Man, I’m teamed with a puppy,” Thunder grinned, picking up his flight gear and following Jack out to the bunker, where the Phantom sat.
The crew chief trailed after Jack during the preflight, proud of the conditioning of his bird and ready to question the pilot if he found anything wrong. “Take good care of her this time,” the sergeant told Jack. “OK? If you fly, don’t bring her back broke like last time.”
Jack nodded. 512 was the best-kept Phantom in the wing. It gleamed with the loving care the crew chief gave to an only child. Unfortunately, the chief’s personal hygiene did not meet the same standards. His fatigues were filthy and he needed a shower and shave.
“Hey, Chief, you want to stand downwind a bit?” The sergeant ignored Jack.
“Why are you back on alert?” Jack asked Thunder as they walked down from the preflight. He felt bad about his backseater pulling a second alert shift with him.
“Would you believe I got lonely?” Thunder changed the subject, not wanting to embarrass his friend. “Besides, we can lift some weights, maybe run some laps around the flight line.”
“What are you, a bloody drill sergeant?” Jack laughed.
The navigator, Major David Belfort, was lying on the floor of the flight deck next to the copilot’s seat, studying the heat-cracked landscape through the lower quarter window at the copilot’s right foot. The desert village the C-130 Hercules was circling for the third time was eighteen hundred miles to the southwest of Alexandria, Egypt, and nestled against small hills that helped protect it from the fury of the Sahara’s harsh climate. Belfort was wearing his headset to muffle the noise of the turboprop engines and didn’t like hearing the pilot and copilot argue whether they should land.
“I think we ought to hotfoot it back to Kano before we have to divert into a field to the north,” Toni D’Angelo argued.
“Relax, Toni,” Sid Luna told her. “We’ve got plenty of time to land, offload the food and still make it back. Besides, these people are hungry. That’s what Grain King is all about.” The copilot did not reply, accepting the pilot’s decision. She nudged Dave with her foot and gave him a thumbs-down gesture, indicating they were going to land.
Belfort’s gut told him the copilot was right — they should heed the latest weather warning she’d received. An unexpectedly large sandstorm was descending on them. But he didn’t say anything. After all, she could hold her own in any argument. She was also an excellent pilot, which surprised her macho skeptics.
The pilot turned onto final approach, calling for her to read the landing checklist. “Sid,” Toni warned, “those people are crowding the right side of the runway. Shade it to the left.”
“I’ve got ’em. No sweat,” Luna replied. The pilots were not surprised to see the villagers crowding the narrow runway. They had seen it many times when they landed: starving, gaunt people, desperate for help.
Toni D’Angelo rechecked the landing gear and placed her left hand over Luna’s right hand, which controlled the throttles. It was a backup technique they had developed to prevent the pilot’s hand from bounding off the throttle quadrant on a hard landing. Sid flew the big cargo plane onto the exact point he wanted on the approach end of the runway. He planted the C-130 hard in a controlled crash, letting the main landing gear absorb the shock before slamming the nose onto the narrow dirt runway. He jerked the throttles back, throwing the four propellers into reverse to help brake their landing rollout.
The Hercules abruptly jerked and skidded to the right, running off the packed dirt of the runway. Luna shouted over the interphone, “Differential thrust!” He fought for control of the Hercules as its props picked up dirt and gravel and threw it in front of them, seriously reducing his visibility.
One of the propellers on the left side had not gone into reverse, which let the props on the right create more drag, flinging them to the right. Both pilots’ hands bounced off the throttles. Luna fumbled for the controls as he fought to keep the Hercules from skidding further to the right. Finally, he found the levers and instinctively threw number four prop on the right out of reverse. On a normal runway, he would have returned all four to idle, but he needed braking action if he was to stop the heavily loaded cargo plane in the little space that remained.
With a prop on each side giving him even braking, Luna regained control of the big cargo plane as it hurtled straight for the crowd of scattering villagers.
Colonel Eugene S. Blevins stalked into the Watch Center in his normally dismal early morning mood. If anything, his natural state of depression was more intense, for he had convinced himself that his career was in jeopardy. The brigadier general selection board was to meet soon and nothing spectacular had happened to him. And unless his sponsor could do something for him, Blevins was going to be just another “nobody” name for the board to consider.
A scan of the big situation boards did nothing to improve his disposition.
The on-duty watch commander, Tom Gomez, was sitting in the battle cab, the glassed-in balcony that overlooked the entire operation, and had seen Blevins studying the boards. When he caught Blevins’ eye, Gomez motioned him to come up the stairs for an update briefing and go through the motions of a change of command.
The Pentagon tried hard to promote the image of a formal, serious procedure, and Blevins believed that it should be one, given the responsibilities involved. But off-going Watch Commander Gomez was of an entirely different disposition and not concerned with formalities that he considered meaningless. His total disregard of established procedures infuriated Blevins, smacking as it did of unprofessionalism. But Gomez was a colonel and slightly senior to Blevins, so what could he do about it? Besides, the man was nothing but a broken-down fighter pilot on his last assignment before retirement. It irritated him that a pilot had been placed in such an important position only because he wore wings and had combat experience in Vietnam. Big deal. He, on the other hand, had done yeoman labor in Intelligence, working up through the field. He knew the subject inside and out; he was one of the people who knew how to make the system work. The other colonel was a Johnny-come-lately, and all because he wore wings on his chest.