Alpha Kat

by William H. Lovejoy

  “Dart, let’s do a one-eighty,” Billingsly said over the intercom.

  “One-eighty coming up,” Miller said, and banked the Kappa Kat into a right turn.

  The maneuver not only sought to disrupt any tracking of them by hostile radars, but in this case was practical. They didn’t want to enter the Mexican ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone).

  “Frog, Sierra’s picked up our emissions,” Contrarez said on the intercom.

  “Jolly good,” Billingsly replied.

  Both hostile aircraft were F-16 Falcons which belonged to the Arizona Air National Guard. They had been reluctantly loaned to KAT, after some telephone calls from Washington, to serve as aggressor aircraft.

  “He’s gone supersonic, thinks he can reach us,” Contrarez reported.

  “Just do your thing, Speedy,” Billingsly told him.

  On Tac Three, Contrarez said, “Five, Hawkeye.”

  “Five.”

  “Sierra’s turning into you and climbing. He’s at Mach one-point-three.”

  “Copy.”

  “Climb to angels two-zero, execute Immelmann, and come down on his six o’clock when he passes under you.”

  “Five.”

  “Six,” George Wagers, Bengal Six, acknowledged.

  A similar scenario was occurring on Tac Two, where the target aircraft had also established a contact on the Kappa Kat. Because he was listening to two channels at once, Kimball missed some of the dialogue which overlapped, but he had a sense of the action.

  “Four?” Billingsly queried.

  “Go Hawkeye.”

  “You should have a visual in thirty seconds. Tango is bearing two-eight-two, altitude two-one-thousand and climbing, velocity Mach one-point-four.”

  “Tally ho,” the catchword for a visual sighting, came twenty seconds later.

  “Weapons released, Four. Fire at will.”

  Tango, intent upon reaching the Kappa Kat, still had no idea where the Alpha Kats were, that they were swinging in behind him, coming up from below.

  “Infrared lock-on,” Bengal Four said.

  Kimball switched to the Tac Five channel they were sharing with the aggressors and keyed the microphone built into his helmet, “Tango, bang, bang!”

  “Shit!” Gaston Greer replied. “I’m taking my airplane and going home.”

  “Bye-bye,” Kimball told him.

  He switched back to Tac Three, where the intercept hadn’t been as successful. Bengal Five reported that he and Six had lost too much speed on their climb out, and by the time they rolled upright at the top of their loop, they had been unable to catch the hostile plane.

  “Okay, Hawkeye Four, I’ve got it. Barnfire, here’s your chance,” Billingsly said in his deep, unperturbable voice.

  “Two.”

  “Sierra’s closing on us at Mach one-point-five, your heading two-zero-four. Contact in forty seconds. Take him out.”

  “Two.”

  The Alpha Kat above them on the left raised its right wing and peeled off.

  The HUD radar display in front of Kimball disappeared as Billingsly switched the radar to passive.

  “Do something other than what we’re doing, Dart,” Billingsly suggested.

  Sam Miller dropped his right wing, and the Kappa Kat rolled over, under Bengal Three, into a descending right turn, spiralling downward. Bengal Three rolled on her right wing and stayed with them. With their emissions halted, the aggressor would lose track of them quickly.

  “Tally ho!” Halek reported.

  “Tell me, Two.”

  “I’ve got him head-on.”

  “Wrong,” Billingsly said, but added, “Weapons released.”

  “Phoenix is gone,” Halek said.

  Kimball hoped fervently that it wasn’t so. The propulsion systems on the missiles hadn’t had their safeties removed.

  “Hell, he shut down on me,” Halek complained.

  “Is it a hit, or not?” Billingsly asked.

  “Wham! He just went by me,” Halek reported. “I don’t know about the hit.”

  “I give it fifty-fifty,” Kimball said on the intercom.

  “I agree,” Billingsly said, then keyed in his tactical radio, “Go Three.”

  Bengal Three left them as Miller pulled the Kappa Kat out of its dive, now heading almost directly east at an altitude of 16,000 feet.

  “Three. I’ve got a visual. Damn it!”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything,” Billingsly said.

  “I almost couldn’t turn in on him, Hawkeye. Got him, now. Infrared lock-on. Released.”

  “We’ll scratch that one, Three,” Billingsly told him. “You didn’t have weapons permission.”

  Kimball jotted the item on his clipboard. He had a full clipboard of errors and omissions for the debriefing session.

  He switched to Tac Five and said, “Sierra, I’ll give you fifteen seconds to spot us.”

  After the countdown ran out, Sierra reported, “Negative, Hawkeye. You people are gone.”

  “At least the stealth part works, Cheetah,” Sam Miller said.

  *

  Ben Wilcox waited until the jet engines shut down, then walked across the cooling concrete toward the C-141. Except for a few floodlights, it was dark, but to the northeast, the lights of San Antonio brightened the horizon. The headlights of traffic on Highway 90 and the 410 bypass were still tightly clustered at nine o’clock at night.

  The big transport was parked with other aircraft, but was the only one with any activity around it. Ground crewmen swarmed over it, and a fuel tanker pulled up beneath the left wing.

  As he watched, the big clamshell doors on the back end parted and the airplane’s ramp lowered to the ground. The interior lighting seeped outward. Two figures descended the ramp.

  Wilcox approached them, carrying his thin attaché case. “Good evening, Sam Eddy.”

  “Howdy there, Mr. Washington. This is Howard Cadwell.”

  Cadwell was a stocky, heavyset man who looked as if he might be a retired defensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys. In the light spilling from the cargo bay, Wilcox saw thinning brown hair with a pronounced widow’s peak, but couldn’t see his eyes clearly.

  “Mr. Cadwell.” He offered a hand.

  Cadwell shook it. “Mr. Washington.”

  He peered upward into the cavernous and empty cargo compartment. “Just the two of you?”

  “We’re the whole show,” McEntire said.

  Wilcox raised his arm and rotated his hand in a large circle. Close to a nearby hangar, the headlights of two semi-tractors illuminated, and one after the other, they shifted into gear and headed toward the plane.

  “You didn’t have any trouble in Charleston, did you?” Wilcox asked.

  “Not after all of the right telephone calls were made,” McEntire said. “Suspicious damned Air Force we got.”

  “With no Soviet Union, we’ve got to be careful about everyone else,” Wilcox said.

  McEntire patted the skin of the clamshell door next to him. “I’ll bet you people didn’t tell the Chief of Staff that these planes were going to KAT. Otherwise, we’d have payed hell getting them.”

  “Seemed an unnecessary admission at the time,” Wilcox conceded.

  The first semi-truck pulled up near the ramp. It was followed by a forklift.

  “We got us two whole truckloads of dummy missiles?” McEntire asked. With an ear-to-ear grin, he said, “We can practice right into the next century.”

  Wilcox stepped away from the ramp, drawing McEntire and Cadwell with him. The back doors of the trailer were tugged open to reveal narrow crates stacked almost to the ceiling.

  “Those crates are labeled ‘Hughes/Raytheon AMRAAM, Simulated Warhead,’ ‘Ford Aerospace/Raytheon AIM-9L, Simulated Warhead,’ and ‘Rockwell Hell-fire, Simulated Warhead,’” Wilcox said. “Same thing for the twenty millimeter rounds and five-hundred-pounders.”

  “Our active radar seeker and the Sidewinder infrared homing missile. Air-to-ground. Nice goi
ng,” McEntire said. “I’m changing my mind about you.”

  “About half of those AMRAAM crates are tagged, ‘Simulated Warhead, Model 2C.’ For the Sidewinders, look for labeling that says ‘Mark VI.’ The Hellfires are ‘System Two.’ On the bombs, you’ll want to watch for the Mark 84s that read Mk 84B. Half the cannon rounds are ‘Blank Firing — Series Two.’” Wilcox told him.

  “These are new training systems? If there’s so many new dummies around, how come we haven’t heard about them?”

  “They’re not so dumb,” Wilcox said.

  “Oh, shit! We’re getting the live stuff here?”

  “I wouldn’t fly that airplane over heavily populated areas,” Wilcox cautioned.

  “What are they doing on a training base?”

  “We brought them over from Randolph. Anything more, you don’t want to know.”

  Wilcox unlatched his attaché case and gave McEntire a thick file folder. “That’s the export and transportation licenses for your cargo, Sam Eddy. Be careful, will you?”

  “On tippy toes.”

  “Anything more you need?”

  “You going to buy us dinner?” McEntire asked.

  *

  Major General Brock Dixon was dressed in a nicely tailored civilian suit that had set him back seven hundred dollars, standing at the public telephone attached to the side wall of a 7-Eleven store in Alexandria.

  “I talked to quite a few people,” Jack Ailesworth told him.

  “And they said?”

  “They didn’t have to say much. All of them were disappointed, to say the least.”

  Dixon drummed his fingernails against the small plastic shelf under the phone. “And what is Procurement’s position?”

  “Naturally, we hold the position we’ve always held. We want what’s in the national interest.”

  Dixon mulled that very general statement for awhile. Every conversation tended to be abstract. No one was going to mention specifics, and the interpretations had to be exact. Then he asked, “How far do we want to go with this?”

  “I believe the consensus is that the nth degree is out, is not desirable. But some kind of flanking action would be helpful.”

  “Jesus, Jack. That’s pretty abstract.”

  “We, that is, they trust your judgment.”

  “Resources?”

  “I can get you two million right away. More later, if required.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Dixon said and hung up.

  From his inside coat pocket, he withdrew a small notebook. He thumbed through it until he found the right page, which he ripped out. It took him several minutes to memorize the number, then he used his cigarette lighter to burn the page. He would not be using this number again.

  Placing a stack of quarters on the shelf, Dixon dialed the number, then fed quarters into the phone.

  The phone rang three times before it was answered. “Crider.”

  “I’ve got a job for you, if you’re interested.”

  “Who is this?”

  “That will remain unknown.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “There’s a code,” Dixon said. “Alligator meat.”

  “New phone number,” Crider said. “Give me ten minutes to get there.”

  Dixon waited eleven minutes, smoking Marlboros, before he dialed the pre-arranged number, which was probably another public telephone. He deposited the required number of quarters.

  “Tell me about the money,” Crider said.

  “A million up front, more if it’s necessary.”

  “I’m interested.”

  Six

  “I’m nervous as hell,” Sam Eddy McEntire said. “You ever see me nervous before?”

  No one had, so no one said anything.

  Wednesday morning was bright outside the front windows of the office. The July heat wavered over the parking lots in mirage-like images. By noon, everyone and everything would be well-baked.

  The pilots gathered in the room weren’t as nervous as McEntire professed to be. Their faces reflected confidence and eagerness, Kimball thought. Tex Brabham, who had been invited to join them, only reflected Tex Brabham.

  If he moved close to the side window and looked down the alleyway between hangars, Kimball could see the tall tail of the C-141 carrying the ordnance. He figured he was more nervous than McEntire. All that high explosive sitting out in the sun.

  “You talk to the man from Washington yet?” Sam Eddy asked.

  “He’s not in his office. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, according to the message I got.”

  “I’m not absolutely fond of him changing the schedule on us. Jesus Christ, Kim! Traipsing around the country with a few tons of high explosives on board wasn’t on the agenda.”

  “Probably illegal,” Jimmy Gander observed.

  “Tell you how nervous Sam Eddy was,” Howard Cadwell said, “he wouldn’t let me touch the controls. The landing here was so soft, I didn’t wake up until we were parked.”

  Kimball didn’t like having Wilcox spring surprises on him, either. The missiles and bombs were safe enough, unless some errant airplane or pickup truck crashed into them, but his mind had been wrapped around picking up the live missiles in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Somewhere else, and overseas, anyway. Like McEntire, he was nervous, and also like McEntire, he suspected, less nervous about the ordnance than the unexpected change in plans.

  “Well, we’ve got it, and we’re stuck with it,” he said. “Have you checked it out, Tex?”

  “Yeah, Kim, I did. What I could see without unloading the damned plane. Looks all right.”

  “Who do you want to put on it?”

  “Carl Dent should be in charge,” Brabham said. “He was an F-15 weapons specialist.”

  “Fine by me. You pick out the rest of your crew?” Brabham handed him a sheet of paper ripped out of a notebook, and Kimball looked it over:

  Zack Freeman

  Wes Overly

  Mark Westergood

  Darrell Williams

  Walt Hammond

  Carl Dent

  Virgil Thomas

  Paul Diamond

  Luke Frale

  Elliot Stott

  Perry Vance

  “You haven’t mentioned our secondary venture to any of them?”

  Brabham snorted. “Hey, boss!”

  “Sorry. Is this going to be enough manpower, Tex?” Kimball Aero had about thirty top mechanics they could draw from, all of them with experience in the Air Force or one of the other services, and all of them serving in supervisory roles for the rest of the workforce. He passed the list around for the pilots to scan.

  “They all have at least two specialties,” Brabham said. “I’d put one man as chief on each plane, plus ordnance, electronics, communications, and computers. Everybody can shift around where help is needed. Thing is, boss, I don’t even have to ask these guys to volunteer. They’ll go, soon as I drop the hat.”

  “Plus,” Sam Eddy said, “we’ve got you.”

  “Plus, we’ve got me,” Brabham agreed matter-of-factly, inching his hat up a fraction on his forehead.

  “You the loadmaster, too?” A.J. Soames asked.

  “Yeah. What I’m going to do, I’m going to pull the dummy missiles off the plane that we need for the rest of the training mission here. Then I’m going to split up what’s left between both transports. Tools, supplies, spare parts, and ground crew get spread between both planes, too.”

  In case one of the C-141s went down or was grounded for maintenance somewhere along the line, Kimball knew, but didn’t say. No one else voiced the obvious, either.

  “We got us one spare turbofan,” Brabham added, “and if no one cares, I’m going to take it along, too.”

  “Do it,” Kimball said.

  The recommended list of mechanics had made its way around the room.

  “Any objections?” Kimball asked.

  No one complained, and Kimball said, “Okay, Tex. You can tell them now. Famili
es and girlfriends have to stay in the dark. We’ll ship out on the fifteenth. You’ve got my new training schedule?”

  Brabham nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  “All right, next item. Have we got any problems with the transports?”

  Gander and Vrdlicka both shook their heads negatively, as did McEntire.

  “Next. Yesterday’s exercise.”

  There were a couple of moans.

  “I know we’ve been away from the discipline and the training for a long time, guys, but this was miserable.” Kimball moved across the room and leaned against Susan McEntire’s desk. He scanned the clipboard he was holding.

  “Jay.”

  Halek grimaced, crunching the unlit cigar in his mouth. He liked cigars, but never lit them.

  “When the AC tells you to move somewhere, you move. No bitching about it.”

  “Gotcha, Kim.”

  “Warren,” Kimball said.

  The black pilot grinned at him. Mabry had been Bengal Four the day before.

  “Nice engagement.”

  “Thanks, Kim.”

  “Fred.”

  Fred Nackerman, who had flown Bengal One, said, “Yo.”

  “Warren lost you on the final turn.”

  “Damn, Kim, he was pulling G’s as if they were a dime a dozen.”

  “I know you’ve got a lot of time as a flight leader, but when you’re the wingman, stay on the wing.”

  “Roger that, Kim.”

  Kimball went to his next note. “Tom and George.”

  Keeper and Wagers, Bengals Five and Six, sat straighter on the sofa. Tom Keeper was one of the two pilots who weren’t ex-Air Force. He wasn’t even a pilot, if service definitions were acknowledged. An ex-Navy lieutenant, he was an aviator, and his experience was in F-4 Phantoms. The fluorescent lights glinted off Wagers’s balding head.

  “My fault, there,” Billingsly broke in. “I initiated the action too late, and they didn’t have a chance to catch the Falcon.”

  “I may have carried my climb out for too long,” Keeper said. “I wanted too much altitude, and I dropped the speed under three hundred knots.”