by Dale Brown
Everyone’s attention was on the two pilots now.
“You know, Sam, it’s a shame your ego isn’t as small as your cock probably is. If it were, it would make everyone’s life on this plane a lot easier.”
The flight engineer, a senior noncommissioned officer sitting at his console behind the copilot, turned and smiled at Marlowe, who was rubbing his nose, wincing in pain. But the smile disappeared and he turned back to his instruments when he caught a disapproving glare from Furness. She exited the cockpit and shut the door behind her with an exasperated bang.
Rebecca Furness—”the Iron Maiden,” as she was known—visited the lavatory (for the first time in eight hours), then poured herself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the galley, curled up on two empty front seats in the airliner-like forward passenger cabin of the KC-10 Extender, used a wadded-up flight jacket as a pillow to rest her head, and opened a four-day-old issue of the Los Angeles Times. It was a hell of a way to go to war—comfortable seats, modern airplane, pressurized cabin, relief crews, bunk beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, a newspaper, and, most importantly, staying far from the front lines. The fighter pilots got all the glory, but they had to be shoehorned into a tiny, uncomfortable cockpit, pee into a plastic bag, and suck oxygen through a mask strapped to their face for hours at a time—and there were bad guys shooting at them out there. The “tanker war” was not as glamorous, but it had much better working conditions.
She tried to read the Times, tried to forget about the incident in the cockpit, but her mind kept drifting back to it. She was seething. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened—there had been plenty of others—and it wouldn’t be the last, but the idea of it happening in the middle of a damned war .… What would the men think if enlisted women were suddenly coming up and grabbing crotches in the middle of an operation, when their concentration needed to be totally focused on the task at hand? she wondered. The jerks. She sighed and wanted to forget about it, returning her attention to the Los Angeles Times.
She ignored the mission radio headset on the overhead console of her seat and stuck a pair of earplugs in her ears to blot out the gentle roar of aircraft noises. The two seats on which she lay were not wide enough for her to stretch out on, so she had to curl her long legs up to keep her boots from dangling into the aisle. Furness was tall, an athletic one hundred and thirty pounds, and if Marlowe could have gotten a good feel of her thigh, he undoubtedly would have found it nice and firm, a result of her almost-daily exercise regimen. She had below-shoulder-length brown hair, but no one on her crew really knew that because she always wore it pinned up and off her collar when in uniform, which was almost all the time. They did notice her dark-brown almond-shaped eyes, her strong nose and jaw, and her habit of talking rapidly and in a very officious pilot’s monotone, which was how she had acquired the boys-only nickname of the Iron Maiden. She knew about the nickname and didn’t give a damn.
Well, she conceded, that wasn’t exactly true. The moniker did bother her, but not because she was tough and professional in the cockpit, which was why most people assumed she had the name. No, she’d earned it for an entirely different reason: her steadfast refusal to date anyone on the base or in her wing. She hadn’t really thought much about the rule, until she’d heard the nickname. She wasn’t even sure why she’d made that policy for herself other than wanting to maintain distance from the men she might ultimately have to go to war with.
But her policy had generated a lot of gossip, especially after her polite but consistent refusals for dates. She’d hear the word “dyke” whispered more than once in passing. She shook her head in exasperated amusement. That was rich. If they only knew about the men she’d had in her life. Some truly wonderful guys, and none in the military. Men who could have run circles around these fly-boys in bed.
But her private life was her own. If they wanted to think she was gay, that was their problem. Another typical, arrogant male assumption. Like little boys, trying to show the girls who had the larger member. And if you didn’t want to play with it, well, you must be …
Rebecca sighed. Now that she thought about it, having just one to play with now and then wouldn’t be so bad, but her time at home was usually focused on recurrent training and simulator sessions.
Not that she really minded, of course. Flying was in her blood, and she spent most of her free time building her flight experience outside her military duties. The military was cutting back flying hours, eliminating squadrons, and closing bases, and the civilian airlines were still hiring, so she turned her attention to a future outside the Air Force. To make herself more marketable to the major airlines, she had accumulated almost a thousand hours of civilian flying time in the past six years—which was quite impressive, seeing that she was away from home for nearly five months every year—and had earned her civilian commercial and airline transport pilot licenses and instrument, flight instructor, multiengine, and even seaplane ratings.
But if life was tough for women pilots in the military, it was equally tough in the civilian world, and although American Airlines and United had practically set up recruiting offices at March Air Force Base, nobody had called her—not even the smaller regional airlines like America West or Southwest, for whom she was probably overqualified with all her multiengine heavy-jet time. Male KC-10 pilots were being actively and aggressively recruited by the airlines at March because Air Force KC-10 pilots got the world’s best heavy-jet training at no cost to the airlines. Some had letters of commitment from a major airline two years before their tour of military duty was up. The airlines were hiring, all right, but not women.
Becky Furness made a few inquiries and got the runaround every time. Women pilots, they said, were paid less to start because they were given more time off and had to be replaced or retrained and requalified more often than men. Bullshit. As a senior squadron flight instructor, she had access to her fellow pilots’ flight records, and she knew that a lot of the guys leaving the squadron who ended up flying in the majors had fewer total hours, fewer pilot-in-command hours, and fewer civilian hours than she did.
She also knew her résumé was a lot more impressive than most.
Born in Vergennes, Vermont, in 1955, she was a 1977 graduate of the University of Vermont at Burlington, majoring in biology, and received a commission in the U.S. Air Force through ROTC that same year after going through a two-year scholarship program. She attended pilot training at Williams AFB in 1978, graduating in 1979 in the top 5 percent of her class. In 1979 Rebecca graduated from KC-135 Combat Crew Training at Castle AFB, Atwater, California, and was assigned to the 319th Bombardment Wing, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, in 1980, flying the KC-135A tanker on strategic combat alert. After upgrading to aircraft commander and instructor pilot, she transferred to the 22nd Air Refueling Wing, March AFB, California, in 1988, flying the KC-10A Extender tanker. She also upgraded to aircraft commander just before Operation Desert Storm.
Yeah, it was a pretty good résumé, she thought, but what good was it doing her?
Just then, to Furness’ surprise, Sam Marlowe emerged from the flight deck, noticed her sitting by herself, and came over to her. She was surprised, not because he dared to approach her after his embarrassing dressing-down earlier, but because she had been so busy since takeoff that she had no time to get up for relief—now, only minutes after taking over, Marlowe was roaming around. “What’s going on, Sam?”
By unspoken consent, they both were determined to ignore the previous incident.
“We got a call to do an emergency refueling farther north,” Marlowe said. “An F-111 and a Tornado.”
“An Aardvark and a Tornado? We gonna do a buddy refueling?”
“Buddy refueling—one-eleven on the boom and Tornado on a pod—then escort all the way to his divert base,” Marlowe said. “All we got was a set of coordinates for the base—no name. Probably a desert strip for the special-ops guys. We rendezvous in about ten minutes at ten thousand feet.”
“I don’t know … I didn’t catch the whole thing,” Marlowe replied. “All I know is, we’re going into Indian country.”
“We’re what?”
“They’re sending us over the border to go get the -111,” Marlowe said. “Only about fifty miles or so, but we’ll be over enemy territory. That means a Bronze Star at least, maybe even a Silver Star.”
So much for a cool, safe, secure little world on board the KC-10 tanker. This plane was a big, slow, inviting target for enemy gunners or missiles even at its best performance—at low altitude with a crippled aircraft on the boom, it was a real sitting duck. Even the world’s worst fighter pilot could down a tanker with one arm tied behind his back. Dread went up and down Furness’ spine. This could really get hairy.
She heard herself say, “I’ll be in the boom pod. I gotta see this.”
“Lucky dog,” Marlowe said. “Maybe you’ll see a really chewed-up fighter jock out there. Take some pictures for me.”
SIX
Mace examined Parsons carefully. His face was sheet white from the cold, but his oxygen indicator was still blinking, which meant he was breathing. Fresh blood was still oozing into his mask. Good, his heart was still beating. Holding the control stick between his knees, Mace wiped the stuff out of his mask to keep it from clogging and suffocating him. Parsons’ head rolled to the right, and it appeared that he was trying to tell him something, but in the howl of the windblast thundering through the broken windscreen it was impossible to hear him.
Mace shouted, “Hang tough, Colonel. We’re almost home!” then reattached Parsons’ oxygen mask and strapped him in tight.
Back on the controls, Mace surveyed the instrument panel. Without an operable fuel gauge and with an electrical emergency, he had to manually control the fuel flow to the right engine, and that required almost constant monitoring. The wing fuel had burned down to zero, so now he had to maintain the longitudinal balance by burning fuel from the forward body tanks. But without boost pumps the forward body would never keep itself filled, so Mace followed an emergency checklist and had to pop a fuel-dump-valve circuit breaker, backflow fuel from the aft body tank to the forward body tank through the fuel-dump system, then push in the circuit breaker and watch the angle-of-attack gauge to make sure they weren’t too tail-heavy or nose-heavy.
Normally the F-111G fuel management system was automatic and he rarely thought about it, but it was amazing what a no-shit inflight emergency sometimes did for your memory—he was able to remember all the funny spaghetti diagrams, the fuel-pump relay logic, even the specific tank quantities and boost-pump flow rates. When it came to life or death, the human mind kicked into overdrive.
Once the fuel panel was set up, Mace got on the radio. “Nightmare” had sent him over to a discrete UHF channel, unsecure but assigned all to themselves, so he knew the bozos in charge—and probably half the Iraqi military command staff—were listening in: “Nightmare, what’s the fuckin’ plan? My pilot is still alive, but he looks like Dracula on a bender, and I need some gas or I’m likely to be walking.”
“Breakdance, this is Nightmare.” The irritated voice of General Eyers (although Mace didn’t know that) came on the line. “Unless you have a specific request or emergency that we need to be notified of, keep off the radio. And use proper radio procedures and terminology on this channel. Over.”
“Hey, asshole,” Mace exploded on the radio, “I haven’t heard squat from you guys in over fifteen minutes. You want some emergency info? I figure if I don’t have any more holes in me, I got about twenty minutes’ worth of gas, at most. My pilot’s hurt bad, and he needs attention. I figure I can’t punch out because of structural damage to the capsule, so I gotta set it down. Now I can see lots of nice, straight paved roads down there, so unless you want to come get me and my car-go,” emphasizing the nukes in the bomb bay, “you better fuckin’ talk to me. Over.”
There was a rather long, silent pause; then a different and far less official-sounding voice came back: “Breakdance, this is Nightmare. We’re doing everything we can. You’re still in Indian country, there are border air-defense units all around you, and this is an unsecure channel, so we can’t tell you too much, but we’re going to bring you down soon. Just hang in there. We’re watching you and your airspace very carefully. If there are any bandits nearby, we’ll tell you immediately. Do your best to avoid SAMs. Otherwise, if you see any aircraft approaching you, maintain your last assigned heading and don’t try to evade. Let us know if your a.c.’s condition looks worse. Stay off the air unless it’s an emergency. We’re right here with you.”
The channel went silent.
The voice sounded like he knew what he was talking about, like a former Aardvark driver. The other guy was a southern Army grunt all the way, probably a general, maybe even Schwarzkopf himself. Well, he was still an asshole for not talking to him. Mace was able to take a deep breath to help some of the tension flow out of his body.
Mace was scanning the skies around him when he saw a small speck of an aircraft. The speck’s position on the canopy did not change, which meant it was on a collision course. At six to eight miles it looked like another F-111, but when it got within five miles Mace recognized it as a Panavia Tornado, Western Europe’s most advanced fighter-bomber.
At first Mace thought the Tornado was joining too fast, and he was ready to dodge away, but the big aircraft swooped quickly but easily into place, about fifty feet away from Mace’s right wing. He could see that it was a British Tornado—the UK, Germany, Italy, and Saudi Arabia all flew Tornados—and that it carried two Sidewinder missiles and two fuel tanks, with all of its underbelly weapon stations empty.
The RAF backseater gave Mace a thumbs-up, then gave him a signal Mace did not recognize. Seconds later, the Tornado dipped under Mace’s F-111G, appeared briefly on the left side, then, in a very dramatic display of expert airmanship, rolled inverted and flew atop the stricken Aardvark so the British backseater could look up through his cockpit canopy and get a good look at any damage on the top side. He was giving Mace a visual inspection; now he felt bad because he was too surprised to give the Tornado as thorough an inspection, because Mace knew he must be coming back from an attack against Iraq. The Tornado then moved away from Mace and, as Mace watched in sheer fascination, the British crew jettisoned its external fuel tanks, leaving only the two Sidewinder missiles. He then moved in close again, and the backseater gave Mace another thumbs-up. To his surprise, Mace noticed the very large portrait of a nude woman sitting atop a bomb painted on the left side of the Tornado, along with the name “Gulf Killer” and the names of its ground crews. The Brits had obviously wasted no time putting nose art on their combat aircraft.
“Pretty slick moves, Gulf Killer,” Mace said aloud, being careful not to talk on the radio. As if he had heard him, the Tornado backseater clasped his hands over his head in self-congratulation.
A few minutes later the Tornado backseater pointed above Mace’s head, and the sight astounded him: the huge, looming fuselage of a KC-10 Extender tanker appeared as if out of nowhere, accelerating easily ahead of the crippled bomber. It was at least two thousand feet above him, but it still looked as big as a thundercloud. The Extender’s air refueling boom was already lowered into the contact position, the nozzle extended all the way into the yellow region, and the buddy pod refueling hose and drogue was extended on the tanker’s right wingtip.
The tanker descended and decelerated a few moments later, so now it was only five hundred feet above Mace’s altitude. A white flashing light appeared on the tanker’s right wingtip and the basket-like
drogue was extended, a signal that the Tornado was cleared in for refueling. The RAF Tornado backseater waved as the Tornado hungrily moved up and, a few seconds later, slid his refueling probe effortlessly into the round white drogue. Then Mace saw two white flashing lights on the director lights along the tanker’s belly, the signal that he was cleared in to the boom.
He’s going to do it, he thought grimly, flipping his checklist to the “Before Air Refueling” and “Before Pre-Contact” pages. He’s going to do a single-engine refueling with a KC-10 tanker at low altitude over enemy territory. The checklist did not take long because he could not do most of the items: exterior lights were not working, wings wouldn’t move, autopilot was already off, fuel system was dead, radar was dead. Mace flipped the air-refueling-door switch and was relieved to get a green AR/NWS light, meaning the air refueling system was ready for nozzle contact.
Slowly, carefully, Mace eased the throttle forward and inched the nose upward. The F-111G responded sluggishly, rumbling in protest as it climbed. The airspeed did not want to increase at all, it seemed, and Mace nudged the throttle forward some more. Before he realized it, he was at the military-power throttle stop, ready to go into afterburner. He knew he couldn’t do that—lighting the ’burners with structural damage and an engine out could start a fire. He could do nothing else but remain patient and hope his crippled bird could catch up.
It took several long minutes, but Mace finally climbed up behind the KC-10 and was inching toward the refueling boom. He was still a good fifty feet from contact, but the huge underside of the tanker blocked his view of everything else. He was now even with the nozzle and moving toward it. The open end of the nozzle was dark, like the barrel of a cannon aimed right at him. The tanker’s director lights urged him forward and up. God damn, he wished he could talk on the radios! Someone please talk to me!
The nozzle was now directly over the shattered windscreen, less than two feet above Parsons’ head. It was huge, eight inches in diameter, with colored markings along its length to visually indicate the distance between aircraft. Mace could see every scratch, every mark, every little word stenciled on the boom and nozzle. It seemed as if it was going to come right inside the cockpit with him.…
