Maxwell’s finger touched the trigger.
Squeeze the damn thing. Shoot and get it over.
Another second.
“Position check, Brick,” said Leroi, high off Maxwell’s right wing. Jones’s job was to radar-search for “spitters” — unobserved newcomers to the fight. Jones sounded worried. “We’re thirty miles past the boundary.”
So they were. The two Hornets were deep into Iraqi air space, and going deeper. On his display Maxwell could see the blip of the Iraqi jet retreating northward at twice the speed of sound.
The MiG was still in range. Maxwell still had a shot.
He slid his finger off the trigger. Okay, pal. You owe me one. Have a nice life.
“Copy that. We’re bugging out.”
Screech. Screech.
The landing gear of the big Russian fighter squawked onto the asphalt surface of Highway U45, the main thoroughfare from Baghdad to the Al-Taqqadum military complex.
Jabbar saw an Army truck coming at him head on. Jabbar’s MiG was still rolling at over a hundred kilometers per hour. From the cockpit, Jabbar could see the truck driver’s eyes. They looked like huge white lamps. At the last instant the driver swerved toward the ditch, rolling the truck up on its side. Jabbar swept past, giving the driver a friendly wave.
Well, he’d almost made it back to Al-Taqqadum. The full-afterburner race with the air-to-air missile had consumed the last of his reserve fuel. Knowing that he would not make it to the Al-Taqqadum runway, Jabbar had decided to plunk the MiG-29 down on the highway while his engines were still running.
That turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Ten seconds after touch down, he saw the RPM indicator for the left engine begin spooling down from fuel exhaustion. And then the right engine. Now he was coasting down the highway in total silence.
Still rolling, Jabbar passed a sign declaring that visitors were ordered to halt. They were entering a restricted military area. Ahead he saw the main gate of Al-Taqqadum air base. Jabbar let the jet roll until the long, drooping snout of the MiG-29 was pointed directly at the door of the sentry house.
A startled guard, holding his Kalishnikov across his chest, came charging out of the sentry house. Suddenly aware of the immense object rolling toward him, the guard dug in his heels. Losing traction, he fell in a heap, still clutching the Kalishnikov.
Jabbar brought the MiG to a smooth stop. He opened the canopy and removed his brilliantly painted red helmet. The red helmet was the single indulgence by which he distinguished himself from his other squadron pilots.
Despite the searing afternoon temperature, the outside air felt cool. He gazed around him at the shimmering desert, the dumbstruck guard, the air base he hadn’t quite reached. Overhead, the sky was a dull, hazy blue. Jabbar realized that he was soaking wet from perspiration.
Several hundred yards inside the gate, he saw a personnel vehicle coming. It would be the base commander and, surely, several Republican Guardsmen.
All in all, he thought, this had been a very bad day. And the worst was yet to come.
Chapter Two
The Hero
The news traveled, literally, at the speed of light. It flashed simultaneously from the AWACS and Rivet Joint to the Commander of the Joint Task Force in Riyadh.
The reaction was predictable.
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” roared Joe Penwell, the Air Force three-star who was responsible for all the United States forces in the Middle East. Penwell was a barrel-shaped ex-SAC pilot. He was famous for his volcanic eruptions of temper. “Just what we need. The Saudis already having shit fits over the sanctions on Iraq, starving the poor Iraqi school children. Now a goddamn shootdown!”
Penwell’s Vice Commander was a bespectacled Navy commodore named Ashby. “Maybe it really was hostile intent,” he said in his monotone voice. “We don’t have the intel debrief yet,”
“Maybe it was some Navy jock full of testosterone who wanted a notch in his belt.” Penwell was on his feet, storming around his desk. “Tell the Hornet flight leader to divert his flight to Riyadh. I’m gonna debrief those clowns personally.”
Ashby compressed his lips and waited a full five seconds, which was what he always did when Penwell went ballistic. “Let’s give it a second, Joe. That would implicate the Saudis, bringing the Hornets directly to Riyadh after the engagement. You know where that could go.”
Penwell fumed for a moment. He knew goddamned well where it could go. Ashby, the bureaucratic piss ant, was right. That’s why Ashby was Vice Commander: to keep him from making such mistakes. Or, in this case, exacerbating a mistake some trigger-happy fighter pilot had already made.
Penwell had another problem. He knew with an absolute certainty that within the next hour he would receive a call from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Or the Secretary of Defense. Or even the President. When the call came, Penwell wanted to say, Yes, sir, I have the facts. A court martial is already in session.
But the Saudis were his first worry. To draw them into a belligerent action against fellow Arabs could unhinge the already fragile allied coalition. No telling where that could go.
“Okay,” said Penwell. “Send the Hornets back to the Reagan. But shoot off a personal-for to the Battle Group Commander. I want all his debriefing intel — and a damn good action report — ASAP.”
Penwell thought again about the Navy fighter pilots. They were crazy bastards. But what did you expect from people who landed airplanes on boats?
“Hornet ball, nine-point-three.”
“Roger, ball,” answered the Landing Signal Officer.
That was the rituaclass="underline" Rolling into the groove, approaching the carrier deck, you announced your aircraft type, that you had the “ball” — the optical glide path reference, then your fuel quantity. The LSO replied with a “roger ball.” It was the verbal contract that acknowledged the LSO’s control of the pilot’s approach to the ship.
Maxwell recognized the LSO’s voice. It was Pearly Gates, a young lieutenant in Maxwell’s squadron, VFA-36.
Maxwell concentrated on the Fresnel Lens at the left edge of the landing area. The illuminated amber “ball” was in the center of the lens, indicating that he was on the correct glide path to the deck. If the ball went high on the lens, it signaled that the jet was high. Unless the pilot corrected, he would overshoot the arresting wires. A low ball was worse. It meant that the jet was settling dangerously close to the blunt aft ramp of the flight deck.
The ball was drifting upward. With his left hand, Maxwell nudged the throttles back an increment. A tiny bit… now put a little back on…
Maxwell’s hands were making infinitesimal corrections with the stick and throttle, nudging, adjusting, keeping his F/A-18 on a precise path to the deck. In his windshield the gray mass of the aircraft carrier swelled like an expanding apparition.
Landing a jet aboard a ship at sea was the most demanding feat in aviation. Since he’d been back to the fleet, Maxwell had added another forty-three traps — arrested landings — giving him a total of 522. Not a lot these days, at least for someone with the rank of commander. But pretty good, he thought, for a guy who’d spent half his career on the beach.
Until six months ago, Maxwell expected that he would never see another aircraft carrier. He had departed the normal fighter pilot’s career path back when he was a lieutenant, still in his first squadron tour. Maxwell was selected for the Navy’s test pilot school at Patuxent River, Maryland. He then spent a tour of duty testing the new F/A-18 Super Hornet, which was just rolling off the Boeing assembly lines.