Phantom Strike

by William H. Lovejoy

  Vrdla peered over the cockpit coaming. “Just want to be sure, Andy.”

  “I’ll let you know what needs to be fixed.”

  “It better not be anything,” Vrdla said, climbing up onto the seat and swinging his legs out onto the ladder.

  Wyatt snapped his small clipboard onto his right thigh, then let Dennis Maal help him into his parachute harness.

  “This has a label on it, Andy. Says ‘Don’t open before Christmas.’”

  “I’ll try not to peek, Denny.”

  Maal was a medium-sized, nondescript man with blondish-grey hair and a matching moustache. He wasn’t much of a worrier, and there weren’t many lines in his face. Nearly fifty, he had put twenty-five years into the Air Force, most of them flying KC-135 Stratotankers. That took steady nerves, and as far as Wyatt could tell, he hadn’t lost much composure since his retirement. His steady hands would be at the controls of the C-130F tanker, and the assignment hadn’t bothered him a bit.

  Wyatt climbed the ladder, and Maal followed him and helped strap him into the seat. By the time he got his helmet on and his communications and oxygen lines connected, the sun was half a red ball on the eastern horizon.

  With the APU providing amperage, Wyatt powered up the panels and tested his Tac One radio. “Yucca Base, Yucca One.”

  Since they were exchanging one desert for another, they had elected to use a desert plant for their call sign.

  “Five by five, One,” Kriswell said. “I couldn’t have done it any better if I’d really tried.”

  “Try the Tac Two channel, and let’s see if your luck holds up.”

  The second scrambled radio also performed well.

  “I just told Bucky he could leave,” Kriswell reported.

  The Citation passed in front of him, with Barr waving, as Wyatt went through the engine start procedures. Both turbojets fired easily, and he left them in the idle range for a few minutes.

  Maal gave him a thumbs-up, slid down the ladder, and removed it.

  Wyatt released the brakes and let the F-4 creep forward. Adding throttle, he picked up speed, turned onto the taxiway, and headed for the end of the runway.

  The Citation lifted off before he reached the end of the taxiway.

  He locked the brakes, lowered the canopy, and ran up the engines to max power, watching the instruments closely. The aircraft rocked and strained against the brakes. Tail pipe temperatures and pressures appeared perfect. He backed off the throttles, checked for airplanes in both directions, then rolled out onto the runway.

  Without stopping, Wyatt turned onto what should have been a centre stripe, and slapped the throttles forward.

  Almost instantly, the acceleration pressed him back into the seat. At 160 knots indicated, he eased the throttles past the detents and into afterburner.

  The Phantom leapt to the chase, hoisted her slim nose, and climbed for the stars, folding in her gear and flaps.

  “Ah, Yucca One, you disappeared on us.”

  Wyatt read the pertinent information off the HUD. “Base, I’m climbing through angels two-five, making six-zero-zero.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought you were doing,” Kriswell said. “Tell me about it.”

  “The cockpit’s a little disorienting,” Wyatt admitted.

  “Hell, I’ve got over a thousand hours in Eagles, and the HUD seems to read correctly…”

  “What do you mean, ‘seems’?” Demion broke in.

  “Give me a while, Jim. What’s bothersome, it still feels like an F-4, and I automatically look down at the instrument panel, but the instruments aren’t in the right places anymore. Christ, they’re not even instruments.”

  The familiar round and octagonal gauges had been replaced by digital readouts and a pair of cathode ray tubes. Wyatt figured each of the pilots would need about ten hours of flight time to become accustomed to the new layout and to learn to rely on the HUD for important data.

  He levelled out at thirty thousand feet on a northerly heading.

  It felt good.

  He eased the stick over and did two rolls.

  “Yucca One, Bucky says cut that out.”

  Leaning to the right, he looked back and down and finally found the Citation flying several thousand feet below.

  “She’s flying just fine,” Wyatt said.

  “Follow the script,” Kriswell ordered. “Damn it, you wrote the script.”

  For the next hour, Wyatt followed the script. With Barr monitoring him, he put the F-4 through a series of manoeuvres that gradually increased the stress on key components. He finished up with two intentionally staged stalls, and pulled out of each one easily.

  “Bucky says you pass, Yucca One.”

  “That’s nice to know. I’ve got two pages of notes on my knee here.”

  “How bad?”

  “Minor things. Adjustments on the stick. Rudder trim is a little jerky. The starboard throttle has a sticking point at seventy percent.”

  “Hell,” Kriswell said, “any kid can live with those. Don’t be so damned picky.”

  “I apologize profusely.”

  “That’s better. Let’s try the navigation.”

  They tried the TACAN first, using radio stations in Rapid City and Omaha to set up the directions. Then Wyatt cut in the NavSat system which used three of the eighteen satellites in the Global Positioning System (GPS) to triangulate his position above the earth. Combined with the radar altimeter, the electronics could pinpoint him to within a few yards of longitude, latitude, and altitude. With the right CRT in the instrument panel switched to the navigation mode, his symbol was displayed in the centre of the screen and superimposed grid lines gave him a graphic interpretation of his geographical position. At the top of the screen, his position was displayed numerically: 43-05-19N 98-45-57W.

  The HUD readouts provided him with the crucial digital data. At the top, his heading was provided: 265. In a box at the right side, the altitude of 32,465 was shown. Along the bottom were his fuel state and his speed indication, currently 461 knots.

  Through Kriswell, Wyatt learned that Barr, flying right alongside him, confirmed the navigational information.

  “Let’s go to video, Yucca One.”

  “Roger the video, Base.”

  The sophisticated camera mounted in the lower nose cone behind a small Plexiglas window could capture true video, enhanced night vision, and infrared imagery. He brought up the true mode on the left CRT, using the small control box added to the side of the throttle console.

  There had not been space enough to give the camera lens rotational or vertical movement, and it was mounted solidly. The screen showed him blue sky, and Wyatt dipped the nose until he picked up a patch of earth surrounding a tiny blue lake. With the thumbwheel, he magnified the image. The lake zoomed up at him.

  “Got myself a lake, Base.”

  “Integrate.”

  With one flip of a toggle switch, the computer copied the true video image and added a simulation of it to the HUD. On a clear day like he had, the simulated image matched what he was seeing through the HUD, anyway, but at night, or in heavy weather, the computer would provide him with an enhanced picture he would not normally have.

  He used two adjustment knobs at the bottom of the HUD and shifted the computer image on the HUD until it matched his real view. If he shifted his head too far to the right or left, the superimposed image slid off the actual one.

  “Looks good to me, Base.”

  “All right, Yucca, that’s enough of that for today. Let’s do the first pass on the search radar.”

  Barr peeled off and ran away toward the south to act as the quarry.

  Wyatt raised his nose to regain some altitude, then coasted along, giving Barr time to hide. Jotted a note on his fuel consumption. Viewed the faraway surface of the earth, which had a beige tinge to it. Noted the cloud formations, stratocumulus and cirrus, building in the west. Thought about buzzing a couple cars on Highway Two, which cut catty-comer across the state, but
decided against inducing any heart attacks.

  After ten minutes, he switched his radar to active which, in a combat situation, provided the enemy with radar emissions which could help pinpoint himself as a target. Selecting the 120-mile search scan, he eased into a mile-wide orbit and made two circuits.

  One target presented itself immediately, and judging by its course and altitude, he wrote it off as a commercial flight headed for Sioux City. He couldn’t find the Citation.

  Barr wouldn’t make things easy, of course, and Wyatt didn’t believe for a minute that he had maintained a southerly course after they had parted company.

  The Citation had radar, primarily utilized for weather detection and anti-collision, but it would be sufficient for spotting the F-4 if it got close enough.

  In ten minutes, at their combined speeds, if he had continued south, Barr could be close to 150 miles away. And out of radar range.

  Wyatt didn’t think so.

  He switched the radar to passive.

  Below on his left was the town of O’Neill, with the Elkhorn River passing to the south of it. Wyatt dropped his right wing, brought the nose over, and spiralled downward, picking up speed to 640 knots and straightening out on a heading of two-hundred degrees.

  After five minutes, he began a wide turn to the right and drained off speed. The radar altimeter reported the Phantom at twenty-six-hundred feet AGL. The town of Atkinson was several miles ahead on his right oblique.

  The Elkhom River was clearly delineated by the meandering greenage that passed from west to east. Wyatt reduced his throttle settings some more and began a right turn that would align him with the river.

  Atkinson flashed past his left wingtip. A few cars had pulled to the side of the highway — Route 20 — so their occupants could crane their necks up at him.

  He dialled in a thirty-mile scan on the radar, then went active.

  The back-and-forth sweep appeared on his right CRT, imposed on the navigation screen. There were no aerial targets there, nor any on the HUD.

  He increased the scan to sixty miles.

  Blip.

  Target at ground level, forty-two miles ahead of him, moving east at 320 knots, following the river.

  Wyatt could imagine that Barr had the Citation about twenty feet off the river surface and below the tops of the trees.

  He switched in the attack radar mode, used the small joystick to centre the target reticule over the symbol on the HUD, and locked it in. The radar would now keep track of that target while, in its search mode, it continued to seek additional targets.

  Wyatt advanced the throttles, moving the speed up to four hundred knots while he continued to lose altitude. He stayed two hundred feet above the river since his speed didn’t allow him to make the same course changes as the river.

  The gap closed to thirty miles.

  If he had had missiles aboard, he would soon have been able to lock a heat-seeker or a radar-homer on the target, then go on to find himself another target.

  “Lock-on, Yucca Base.”

  “Roger, One.” After a couple seconds, Kriswell came back with, “Bucky says ‘bullshit.’”

  “He’s lucky I gave him a chance to say it.”

  Wyatt checked his fuel state. He had about fifteen minutes left.

  He shoved the throttles into afterburner.

  The HUD symbol zipped toward him.

  A few moments later, the Citation appeared sharply in the video screen, dancing above the thin trickle of the river, dodging the trees leaning toward it from both sides.

  Wyatt pulled the stick back and went vertical as soon as he passed over the business jet.

  “One, Base. Bucky says you’re a show-off.”

  “He’s probably right,” Wyatt said.

  The pressure of the gravitational force pressing him into the seat was sobering and exhilarating, yet he didn’t feel the same sense of clarity and elation he knew he would feel when his target was the real thing.

  It wouldn’t be as easy then, and the targets were capable of shooting back.

  That’s what got the adrenaline pumping.

  *

  Janice Kramer’s United flight landed at Albuquerque at one in the morning, and she took a cab north to her condo.

  After unlocking the door, she dropped her two pieces of luggage on the carpet inside, then went around turning on table lamps and checking the soil of her plants for moisture. They were all in good shape, so she suspected that Liz Jordan had stopped by.

  Someone cared, anyway.

  She didn’t think Wyatt had been in.

  While she stripped off the jacket of her travelling suit, then her blouse and skirt, she punched the replay for the answering machine. There were eleven messages, six of them from Wyatt. His missives were curt and to the point, as usual. “It’s me again. Call, will you?” She picked up the phone and called the Sandy Inn in Ainsworth. It rang eight times while some poor soul got out of bed to answer the switchboard. Whoever it was tried to be cheerful, though not quite successfully, when she asked for Cowan’s room.

  The room phone rang twice.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Cowan. This is Miss Manners.”

  “Jan? Where are you? I’ve been trying…”

  “I’m back on the old stomping grounds,” she said.

  “Great. Look…”

  Are you going to ask me where I’ve been?

  “Look at what?” she asked.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  “I see,” he said. The sleep was going out of his voice, and the steady baritone sounded good to her.

  “I called to tell you I’ll be here until the present project is completed.”

  “What? What are you talking about, Jan?”

  “Somebody has to man the shop until you’re back, and that’s me. So I came back.”

  “Thank you.”

  Just say you need me.

  After a long silence, she said, “I talked to some law firms in L.A. I think I’ll be getting some offers.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  Just ask me to stay.

  “If you need anything — letters of recommendation, a phone call or two … “

  She slammed the phone down.

  Nine

  “You woke me up, Bucky.”

  “Some mornings aren’t so grand,” Barr said. He hadn’t felt good himself since the middle of breakfast, when Wyatt told him about Kramer. In fact, he had left his stack of pancakes in favour of the phone in the hallway next to the unlit and vacant bar area.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Kramer asked him, and Barr could hear the concern in her tone. “Did someone get hurt? Who?”

  “Me,” he said. “I’m hurt that you dropped this bullshit about leaving on us.”

  “It’s not bullshit at all, Bucky. It’s time for me to move on.”

  “That’s always an excuse for some other reason.”

  He waited for her to say something about needing new challenges.

  She said, “I need some new directions, Bucky. New challenges.”

  “As an associate in some stuffy law firm? Where’s the thrill in that, Jan?”

  “They’re talking partnership.”

  “You’re already a partner. Hey, you have enough crises in a week to keep you going for a year…”

  “The money’s good,” she said.

  “You want more money? We’ll give it to you.”

  “That takes a vote of the board.”

  “You’re on the board,” he countered. “Hell, you can have my salary.”

  “I don’t want your salary. I want to move on.”

  “Goddamn it! Do me one favour.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t make a commitment to anyone until I get back and talk to you.”

  “We’ve just talked,” she said.

  “Face-to-face.”

  She sighed. “All right, Bucky.”

  The N
oble Enterprises bunch were up from their tables and filing out the door to the Jeeps when Barr hung up.

  Wyatt was standing a few feet away, looking at him. “What’d she say?”

  “You need a kick in the ass.”

  “She said that?”

  “She might as well have.”

  Barr was going to add more to that statement, then decided to hold off. He brushed past Wyatt, crossed the cafe, and pulled open the glass door.

  It was hot out, but that wasn’t unusual.

  *

  Neil Formsby arrived in Quallene, Algeria, at three in the afternoon of the twenty-fifth of July. It was 119 degrees in the shade of the date palms, but there weren’t enough palm trees to go around.

  By his estimation, they were almost nine hundred miles south of Algiers and eleven hundred miles from the western coast of the continent. From his point of view, that was just about right.

  The overland route from Rabat, with detours around population centres, had added eighteen hundred miles to the tens of thousands already on the odometers of his rented and badly abused vehicles. There had been a dozen breakdowns en route, but he had planned for the possibility with a cache of extra parts, and each repair to carburettors, fuel pumps, alternators, and broken springs had been accomplished at the side of the road.

  His convoy included seven tanker trucks, one flatbed semi-truck with an aged D-9 Caterpillar tractor on it, and the Land Rover that he was driving. There were seventeen men of just about as many nationalities and driver’s licenses assisting him, and he suspected that all of them were wanted in one country or another for at least a single capital crime. He had let his beard grow, and he had allowed the grime to build up in his clothing, just to fit in with the crowd.

  The arrival of his drivers increased the population of Quallene significantly. It was barely a wide spot in what the Algiers government probably defined as a road. A dozen decrepit buildings housed an unknown number of people who, being intelligent and non-British, were staying inside and hidden away from the midday sun.

  He stuck his arm out the window and rotated it in big circles, signalling the truck drivers behind him to keep their units rolling.

  He drove on through the village and picked up speed to nearly forty kilometres per hour. The speed was positively exhilarating after the twenty-five kilometre per hour average they had managed.