"I guess it must be Saturday night," Troy said. "The days just run together. One's the same as the next." "You sound despondent," she scolded. "Gotta get your blood sugar up. Did you get those cookies I sent?" "Not yet. When did you send them?"
"Last week."
"They'll get here. They're pretty good about getting our mail to us… not necessarily in a timely way… but it seems to get here sooner or later….. So where's Dad, if it's a Saturday?"
"He went in to work… something about the warehouse… I don't know."
It was his mother's turn to have a despondent edge to her tone of voice. Troy decided to change the subject, a subject that worked its way around to the question of when he'd be coming home.
Again, he explained that tours were being extended. "What exactly is going on over there?"
"You know I can't talk about what we're doing," he explained, mad at himself for his patronizing tone.
"I watch it on the news, and it just doesn't make sense. These guys look like just a bunch of ragtag punks, but they seem to be winning. Can't you stop them?"
"We're trying, Mom. We're trying."
"This morning there was a thing on the news… they said that the Americans shot down some planes that belonged to one of those countries over there… not to the punks… but to a country. Did you hear about that over there?"
"Yes, Mom, I did," Troy answered, suppressing the urge to tell her that he was one of the Americans.
"Is it true?"
"True, what?"
"That Americans are shooting down planes." "Yes… it is true."
"What's gonna happen?"
"That's up to the politicians to decide."
"Promise me one thing, Troy."
"What's that, Mom?"
"Promise me you'll stay away from where they're shooting down airplanes."
"Ummm… "
"Promise me."
"Yeah, Mom… I promise I'll do my best."
Chapter 9
"Thank you, sir."
Eight days and five or six dozen software upgrades later, Troy Loensch had just gotten restored to flight status.
Eight days of grunt work — albeit high-tech grunt work — had gotten Troy's attention. A 1.8-millimeter Phillips screwdriver and a pair of needle-nose pliers were not exactly like the control stick of a jet fighter. The first couple of days of plugging, playing, and running diagnostics with a laptop had made Troy feel a bit humiliated. For the next few days, humiliation had gradually turned to humility. Troy found himself working side by side with people who did this for a living, day in and day out. They crouched in awkward places in the fuselages of airplanes in hangars that felt like ovens so that hotshot pilots like Troy Loensch could have the means to be hotshot pilots. When he finally got the word that his indentured servitude had come to an end, Troy was ecstatic, but at the same time, he would never again take the software geeks for granted.
"We need you back in the air," General Raymond Harris explained from behind his messy desk. "We can't afford a pilot off flight status with the situation on the ground as screwed up as it is. Besides that, your team needs you."
"Team… needs me?"
"Yeah… they've been on my case to get you back in the air. Both of 'em. Coughlin and Munrough…. especially Coughlin."
Troy was dumbfounded that Hal and Jenna had interceded with the general to get him back in the air. Both had reasons to be glad that he wasn't flying with them. He was also surprised at his own reaction when the general had referred to the three of them as a "team." They flew together, executed missions in a coordinated manner, and got things done, but he had never thought of them as a team, certainly not in the sense of the football teams on which Troy had played such a long time ago.
He caught up to his "teammates" in the officers' mess, sitting together at a table on the edge of the room. Troy grabbed a cup of coffee and walked over.
"Guess what," he said in as cheerful a tone as he could muster, given that the mere sight of them reminded him of the long-strained relationship. "You are rid of me no longer. I'm back in the air."
"Mission briefing at 1400," Jenna said, standing up to leave. "Check you then."
"I heard you put in a good word for me with the general," Troy said to Hal as Jenna left the room. "I don't deserve it… but thanks."
"Whatever your faults, man… you're still a helluva pilot."
"Thanks. It's appreciated.. * ummm… coming from you… I mean I don't deserve it from you."
"Like I said… you're a helluva pilot."
"It was Munrough who saved your ass in that dogfight," Troy reminded him. "It wasn't me. I was just watching and trying to get there."
"I know… I owe her big-time… but I appreciate that you were coming back."
"All's well that ends well, I guess."
"It ended well," Hal said. "Unless you count the reprimands."
"That's no big deal… anybody who reads those reprimands is going to see that we got into a fight and lived to tell about it… who would you want on your team? Who would they want on their team?"
"Haven't heard you use the word team before," Hal said. "Guess I'm glad to have people like… y'know… you and her on mine."
"Don't get all gushy on me now," Troy said, getting up to go. "See you at 1400."
Troy felt good, sitting in at his first briefing in nearly two weeks — even if it was a good news/bad news briefing.
The good news was that it would be a shorter mission than those to which Troy had been accustomed before his grounding. The bad news was that it was over Sudan. The front in the war had crept much closer to Atbara.
Troy was happy beyond words to be back in the saddle again, but he was hoping that his first mission after the grounding would be routine. The last time he had this stick in his fist, he had been thumbing a trigger that killed a MiG — and created an international incident.
About four hundred clicks south of Atbara, Falcon Force descended from a cool, cloudless fifteen thousand feet to a hazy fifteen hundred. In this arid desert, ground fog was rare. The haze that pilots often encountered was the remnant of the incessant dust storms that made life in Sudan generally unpleasant for aficionados of fresh air.
The target for the day was not a place on a map, but a set of coordinates in a trackless desert north of Al Qadarif. The ISR Sigint interpreters somewhere back behind the front lines had decided that these coordinates marked the spot where the Al-Qinamah had located the command post that directed their attacks on UN Forces east of Khartoum.
A bunch of ragtag punks. That's what Troy's mother had called Al-Qinamah. Others — a lot of others — had called them worse — a lot worse — and they were. It seemed counterintuitive that punks riding around on donkeys could be so sophisticated in their technological expertise that it took AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 electronic pods to keep tabs on them.
Falcon Force dropped to two hundred feet.
It was showtime.
For today's mission, both Hal and Troy were carrying pods, with Jenna flying off Troy's left wing with HARMs.
Below, in the ocean of dirt, there would be no landmarks, no mosque spires of a rebel-held city, only a camouflaged communications hub that American eyes would not see but American ISR pods would hear.
If the bad guys were smart — as often they were — there would be no position-revealing ground fire. They knew that in Eritrea, rules of engagement prevented the Americans from attacking them, but here in Sudan, the American jets they heard approaching were likely to have a hellstorm of cluster bombs beneath their wings.
Today, at least one bad guy wasn't smart.
"Tracers at one o'clock," Jenna reported.
"ZSU?" Troy asked.
"Smaller. Just a quick burst. Probably a nut with an AK."