The pilots usually ignored small-arms shooters with no chance of hitting a fast-moving jet — and it was pointless for them to try to hit back at a target so small and so easily concealed.
"We're on top of the target… now," Hal reported.
It was merely a formality. Hal and Troy had already lit their AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 gear, and it was working autonomously.
"Didn't see anything," Troy said.
There was nothing to see. A few seconds after Hal had said the word now, they were already ten miles from the target.
"Hiding in a hole probably," Jenna said with disdain for the Al-Qinamahs back there.
"Climbing to flight level one-five-five," Hal said. "Roger one-five-five," Jenna said calmly. "One-five-five and home," Troy said. "Ugh. Come on you, what's the—"
"Falcon Three, what's up?" Hal asked.
"Some kind of fuel issue… Getting sluggish performance."
"Can you climb to one-five-five?"
"Maybe… ugh… no. I'd better level out at five-five," Troy said, opting not to climb any higher because his aircraft was not behaving properly.
"We're with you, Falcon Three," Jenna said, leveling out at Troy's altitude.
"Roger, five-five," Hal confirmed, doing the same. Guess we must actually be a team, Troy thought to himself.
It startled Troy to discover that the others were dropping back to his altitude. Long ago, deep in a wilderness, Troy had deliberately abandoned Hal. Today, high over another wilderness, Hal had deliberately not abandoned Troy.
A few minutes later, Troy's warm fuzzy feeling was jolted — literally — as his F-16 began to shiver. He looked at the fuel gauge. It was dropping much faster than it should be. His left wing tank was nearly empty, increasing the weight on the right and making the plane hard to control.
"Falcon Three here, I'm losing fuel… pretty fast, too."
"You okay to Atbara?" Hal asked.
"Think so," Troy said. "Left wing tank is dry and I'm having trouble pumping from the aft tank. Right wing… very heavy."
The F-16 shivered again.
Troy was doing his best to adjust the crossflow of fuel, but his whole fuel system was misbehaving, and not enough was reaching the engine. The aircraft was slowly losing altitude.
Would he be able to maintain his altitude long enough to reach Atbara?
Below, the trackless desert raced beneath his wings. What if he had to punch out?
A SAR chopper could reach him in an hour or so. If there were no bad guys around, it would be a mere inconvenience. If there were bad guys, then it could be — probably would be — all over.
"Seven minutes out," Hal said calmly after what seemed to Troy like an eternity of fighting to keep his plane from slumping to the ground. "Falcon Three, go on in first."
"Atbara approach," Troy called. "This is Falcon Three… I'm declaring an emergency… coming in bingo fuel."
"Roger Falcon Three, we have your flight on the scope, you're cleared to land at your discretion. We are vectoring other traffic out of the approach pattern…. will you need assistance on the ground?"
"Not if I make it as far as the runway," Troy said, half joking. He knew that he could land the F-16 if he could get it to the runway, if he could get it on the runway. If he didn't make it to the runway, they could take their time picking up the pieces.
As he banked left to line the aircraft up with the strip of asphalt in the distance, Troy felt the F-16 shudder and fall.
Starved of fuel, the 3,700-pound Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 had just quit.
The lump in Troy's throat seized like the fuel line to the engine, and he yanked back on the stick in an effort not to lose any more altitude until he reached the runway.
He was coming in fast and low, low enough that he imagined he could see the expressions on the faces of the guys on the donkeys in the desert just beneath him.
The higher-than-normal airspeed kept his momentum up and contributed to his keeping the aircraft up, but coming in fast and low was not the best way to land an F-16.
The fast-forward momentum was not Troy's best friend, it was his only friend. It was the only thing that was keeping his nose above the top of the perimeter fence. It would also mean that if the F-16 hit the ground before the runway, the destruction would be so complete and so fast that Troy would feel no pain.
From above and behind, Jenna watched Troy's F-16 racing toward the runway, flying in formation with its own shadow. She watched the airplane and shadow merge into one as the F-16 dropped to an altitude of practically zero.
Jenna gritted her teeth, noting that Troy still had a quarter of a mile — an endless distance under these circumstances — to go before he was over the runway.
She expected at any moment to see the F-16 suddenly turn into a tumbling cartwheel of scrap metal.
Through her mind dashed the images of this aggravating asshole of a man and his self-centered behavior at every turn. Yet despite this, she yearned, even prayed, that he would not die.
She stared at him, ahead and below, for those few seconds that stretched to eternity.
Suddenly, the airplane was engulfed in a gray cloud.
In less time than it took for the image to travel from eye to brain, she realized that this was merely the burning rubber of a dead-stick aircraft's tires hitting a runway at high speed.
Aboard that dead-stick aircraft, Troy had waited painfully long before dropping his landing gear, so long that he was not sure the gear was fully extended when he hit the runway.
He clenched his teeth, waiting for the ground loop that never came.
The hotdogger quickly replaced the man who had almost died, and Troy used his last spurt of momentum to turn neatly off the runway and onto the taxiway as though nothing had happened.
Chapter 10
"Thanks, man," Troy said sheepishly.
"Thanks for what?" Hal Coughlin asked.
The two men were walking from their quarters to the briefing room. Barely eighteen hours after Troy had landed with two lucky nine-millimeter holes in his fuel system, the Falcon Force was going out again.
"I thought about that day, that night, y'know, out in the Colville," Troy said. "I thought about how I left you… and then… I was in trouble out there yesterday by Al Qadarif… and you didn't leave me."
"You made it back on your own," Hal said. "You didn't need anything I did… nothing that Munrough did. We couldn't do anything but watch."
"Still, it's the thought that counts," Troy said appreciatively.
"I don't want you dead," Hal said. "As hard as that may be for you to believe, I don't want to see you dead. When I was lying on my back in the hospital, I probably would have shot you if you came through that door…. but…"
"Thanks for that… I guess…"
"I don't want you being dead on my conscience," Hal said.
"I don't want it there either," Troy agreed, ducking into the head, as much to get away from an awkward moment as to get rid of the remnants of the three cups of coffee in his bladder.
As he emerged, he noticed Hal at the end of the hallway. Jenna was there too. Neither saw him or looked in his direction. This was not the least bit unusual; everyone was headed to the same briefing. However, they were standing awfully close to one another, closer than two pilots usually stood next to one another — much closer.
Pilots who were part of the same flight were supposed to work closely, but there was something more to this. Troy was about to accuse himself of overthinking the situation when he saw their hands touch — not accidentally, nor for just a split second. Then, for a split second, he saw Munrough's hand touch the back of Coughlin's flight suit. Aha, there was more to it than met the eye.
Any briefing that begins with a sentence containing the phrase not going to be easy is one of those that gets your attention.