by T. E. Cruise
Harrison had been shocked by the blatantly obvious partisan nature of the pilots union claim and had fully expected it to be ridiculed, but then, he always had overestimated the intelligence of the public. On Thursday a couple of newspapers had trumpeted the allegation, and a few labor unions had put the bite on the French government, which caused the Transportation Minister to back away from his statement, explaining that it was premature to absolve GAT. And so the witch-hunt would continue.
There was a knock on the door. Susan got up to let in Steve and Linda.
Linda was dressed in one of those slacks-and-sweater outfits she tended to favor. Steve was wearing chinos and a plaid sports shirt: comfortable clothes for a long night’s work planning our defensive strategy for tomorrow, Harrison thought.
“Want a drink?” Harrison asked.
“Love one,” Steve said. He winked at his sister as he added to Harrison, “That’s okay, Don, don’t get up.”
Harrison laughed. “Thanks, because I happen to be too exhausted to get up.” He kicked the folders lying about his stockinged feet, sending them skidding a short distance across the carpet. “I’ve got to reread all this crap before the hearing at the Ministry tomorrow.”
“You lucky duck,” Steve muttered from the bar, where he was pouring himself a scotch on the rocks. “I’d rather talk aeronautics with a bunch of eggheads any day than try and stop the hemorrhaging concerning the 600’s advance orders.”
“It’s going that badly, huh?” Susan asked. She glanced at Linda. “Want some white wine?”
“Love some.” Linda nodded gratefully.
“It’s chilling in the fridge behind the bar. I’ll get it,” Susan replied.
Steve was saying, “It looked as if I had not only been holding the line, but also regaining some lost ground with our customers, especially after the Minister’s first announcement, and when I’d made it clear to our prospective buyers that we were willing to share all the data results from our flight tests on the remaining two GC-600 protos.”
Harrison nodded. “But then came that damned pilots union assertion.”
“Right,” Steve said, taking his drink with him over to the couch, where he lit a cigarette. “The airlines were already a little queasy about the idea of opening up negotiations with their pilots unions concerning reducing the cockpit crews by one man. Now they’re scared that if they buy the 600, this crash will give the pilots the ammo they need to take their argument against the plane to the public.”
“What a damned mess,” Harrison said mournfully.
“I suppose we’re going to have another room-service dinner,” Linda complained mildly. She and Susan were seated at the bar with their glasses of wine.
“Do you really mind?” Harrison apologized. “Steve and I have got a lot of work to do for tomorrow, and frankly, I don’t think I’m much in the mood to be gawked at in a restaurant.” He sighed. “Thank God it’s mostly property damage and questions about the reliability of the airplane we have to contend with.”
“What you’re saying is, thank God no one was killed,” Steve added.
“Except the pilot and the copilot,” Linda said somewhat sharply, frowning at Steve.
Steve nodded. “Of course, except for them,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by leaving them out, honey.” He smiled sadly. “I guess maybe because I was a pilot I said it the way I did. You see, I know personally that sometimes a pilot ends up like a sea captain. Sometimes he—we—have got to go down with our ship.”
“No, I’m the one who should be sorry for snapping at you,” Linda insisted. “I guess I’m feeling just a little edgy being cooped up here, feeling ostracized and in a state of siege.”
The telephone rang. Steve reached for the receiver. “Yes?” He listened a moment and then told Harrison, “It’s long distance. The switchboard is putting it through now. Our corporate counsel in L.A.”
“Sam Wilcox?” Harrison frowned, glancing at his watch. “It’s early morning, West Coast time.”
“Yeah, Sam,” Gold was saying into the telephone. “I can hear you fine. What’s up? Huh? You’re shitting me!”
“What is it?” Harrison demanded. Steve put his hand up to silence him.
“Yeah, Sam.” Steve said wearily, rolling his eyes at Harrison. “Yeah, absolutely it’s a phony. We would never do such a thing— That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, I agree. I think— Huh? What? That serious? Really? Okay. Yeah, sure. We’ll take your advice, pal. Right now. Yep! Bye. And Sam? Thanks. This one was above and beyond the call of duty.” He hung up.
“Well?” Harrison demanded.
“Sam Wilcox was calling us from home. He says that this morning’s Los Angeles Gazette is running a front-page article that claims GAT knew all along that there were safety glitches in the GC-600’s fly-by-wire control system.”
“That’s absurd!” Harrison cried out.
“The Gazette bases its allegations on anonymous sources.”
“Our old friend, Icarus,” Linda said dolefully.
Steve nodded. “The paper claims that it’s been supplied with a copy of a memo signed by Don Harrison advising Steve Gold to fudge over any safety questions from potential customers by offering advantageous financial incentives.”
“I never wrote any such memo!” Harrison blurted. “It’s so blatantly, obviously a setup! As if the airlines would purchase an unsafe airplane just because we knocked a few bucks off the price…” He shook his head. “Surely nobody would swallow such malarkey.”
“Like they wouldn’t swallow the European Pilots Association’s allegations?” Susan asked dryly.
“Oh, my God,” Harrison murmured sadly, covering his face with his hands.
Susan said, “It’s perfectly obvious that Icarus has moved from revealing embarrassing leaks to creating them by forging that memo.”
“We all know that,” Linda offered. “But the rest of the world doesn’t.”
Steve nodded. “Which leads me to what else Sam said. He strongly advised that we should take the first flight home.”
“Sure.” Harrison nodded vigorously. “We’ve got to get home to refute those damned scurrilous lies.”
“It’s worse than that,” Steve said. “Sam says that before he called us he contacted a French law firm with which he’s done business. It seems that there’s a real possibility in light of this latest allegation that if we delay, the French authorities might move to hold us on criminal charges.”
“Are you kidding?” Susan squeaked, her eyes huge with disbelief.
“You hear me laughing?” Steve scowled. “Two men died in that crash. If a case could be made that we strongly suspected their lives were in danger and still sent them up in that airplane…”
“Let’s get packing,” Harrison said. “Steve, would you call the front desk and let them know we’re checking out? See if the concierge can get us booked on a flight—”
“To anywhere,” Steve finished for him, picking up the telephone.
CHAPTER 16
(One)
In the sky over the ACM ranges
Ryder AFB, Nevada
14 June, 1978
Lieutenant Andy Harrison’s Stiletto cut through the sky at 25,000 feet over Pablo Mesa, a stretch of mocha desert broken by ridges the color of burnt toast. Andy was flying with his squadron section and his section instructor when he saw Major Robbie Greene’s flat-black F-5E coming at him like Darth Vader in pursuit of Luke Skywalker.
You son of a bitch, here you come like a bad penny, Andy thought as he eyeballed Robbie’s little black Scooter, a speck at seven o’clock high on Andy’s port wing. As Andy watched, he saw Robbie roll his ship sideways into a descending attack approach meant to put him smack on Andy’s tail.
Goddamn you, Robbie! Andy knew from hard experience gained growing up in the same house with his half brother that Robbie intended to humiliate Andy in front of his squadron buddies and the instructor, Captain Tom Bartlett, whose Stilletto was painted a brillian
t bumblebee-striped yellow and black so that the students could easily locate him here in the classroom of the sky.
These past couple of weeks in Fighter Weapons School had been spent living in the classroom and the cockpit. Andy and his squadron had studied the physics of air combat until their dreams at night were filled with equations concerning energy, attack angles, and lift vectors. When they weren’t busting numbers, they were cramming themselves full of facts concerning the Soviet Union’s methods of training pilots, how the Reds organized their air force, the Commies’ air formations and tactics, their radar command and forward air-control capabilities, and so on.
Mornings at school were devoted to books and blackboards, but in the afternoon the students got to put what they’d learned to practical use in the air. Andy and his squad section had spent their first few hops showing their instructors what they could do in basic one-vee-one visual-contact dogfights, and then moved on to gradually more complicated radar intercept and ground-control-guided mix-ups involving multiple birds.
Andy and his fellow squadron members found themselves learning about each other as well as their airplanes. The instructors encouraged the squadron to form alliances and partnerships of pilots within itself so that two guys could be flying, say, a MiG sweep, and both would know what the other would do in a given situation without a word needing to be said on the radio. The instructors emphasized that while this “pilot’s telepathy” had always been important in the lightning-fast pace of a dogfight, these days it was especially crucial given both sides’ modern technological ability to jam communications.
Since Stilettos were single-seat jets, a large part of the training was also devoted to scanning procedures in which a flight divvied up responsibility for watching the sky. Right now. a squadron member named Johnson flying on Andy’s port side in the four-ship line-abreast formation was supposed to be responsible for the section of sky just now occupied by Robbie’s black-package F-5E, but Johnson hadn’t yet called the bogie.
Robbie pressed the radio transmit button on his throttle and said, “Mustang three to lead. We’ve got company about seven o’clock high.”
“Roger, three,” Captain Bartlett replied. “I was wondering how long it would take you Mister Magoos to spot him. Mustang Two, wake up, son! That should have been your call.”
“Roger, sorry, lead,” Johnson replied. “I did see it, but that little guy has got to be an F-5E.”
“That’s the F-5E,” Bartlett corrected. “That’s Major Greene’s black beauty.”
“Roger,” Johnson said. “That’s why I didn’t call it. I didn’t figure we’d be playing with the Attackers until Red Sky began.”
Bartlett said, “You guys call everything from now on, because it’s almost ‘Anything Can Happen Day’ here at the Mickey Mouse Club.”
Andy smiled. Next week would be their last week of training. They would be given “check rides” to receive their mission ready status, which would mean, among other things, that they were fully conversant with the rules of engagement during Red Sky, and that they could handle their birds down as low as a hundred feet above the desert floor.
Bartlett continued. “Your last week of training you can expect us to throw any number of wild cards your way, and that includes guest appearances by the Attackers.”
But that’s next week, Andy thought, perturbed. So why was Robbie loitering around the schoolyard today?
“Mustang lead, this is Knight seven,” Robbie said, dialing into the flight’s frequency. “I saw your little duckies flying all in a row and couldn’t resist coming on down to have me a snack. Tell me, Mustang lead. When are you going to let them remove their training wheels?”
“Not today. Knight seven,” Bartlett said easily. “You go pick on somebody your own size.”
Andy heard Robbie laugh coldly: “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Your whole flight put together isn’t my size. Especially not this little fellow flying number 34.”
Andy gritted his teeth. Number 34 was his bird.
Robbie drawled, “Mustang lead, let’s see what what your fledglings are made of.”
Andy gasped, hunching his shoulders as Robbie put on a burst of speed in order to rise up over his Stiletto, and then drop down so that his black F-5E’s belly was almost grazing the top of Andy’s canopy. Andy couldn’t help himself from dropping his bird out of formation in order to put some breathing room between himself and Robbie.
“Dammit, Major Greene!” Bartlett exploded. “Are you crazy?”
“Sorry, Captain, but I just couldn’t resist,” Robbie chuckled. “And sorry, 34. Didn’t mean to make you flinch.”
The black F-5 lifted off lightly, insolently banking across the flight’s path. Andy, seething with embarrassment over the way he’d let Robbie bluff him out of formation, stared at Robbie’s bird, its foot-tall “I” designation done in Soviet-style red with yellow piping on its black nose and tail.
“Bye-bye, 34,” Robbie taunted. “Remember, come Red Sky, you can run, but you can’t hide.” The black 5-FE’s dual tail pipes glowed orange as Robbie climbed swiftly away.
Andy felt furious, impotent, and foolish. He hadn’t seen his half brother since their confrontation in Robbie’s office over two weeks ago. Since then Andy had once again come round to the notion that he and Robbie might be able to bury the hatchet, especially in light of GAT’s hour of need. The newspapers and TV news broadcasts had been full of nasty insinuations against GAT management concerning the GC-600 jetliner crash in Europe a couple of days ago. Andy was considering going to Robbie and telling him that it was time to put their own differences aside in order to help the elders in the family put the wagons in a circle against outside enemies.
But I guess nothing matters to Robbie but his hatred, like an all-consuming fire, Andy now thought grimly as he watched the black F-5E shrink in his cockpit HUD display. Suddenly he grinned, seized with a delicious idea: Everybody knew you had to fight fire with fire.
He pressed his helmet back against his headrest and cobbed his throttle to full military power. The Stiletto leapt forward out of the line-abreast formation, and once Andy was safely distanced from the rest of his flight, he went to full afterburn, in order to swiftly close what had become a several-mile gap between himself and Robbie.
“Mustang three, what do you think you’re doing?” Bartlett demanded.
“I intend to teach a black crow to eat crow,” Andy replied, thinking, Maybe, just maybe, I can take Robbie right now.
Normally he knew that he wouldn’t have a chance in hell against Robbie this early on in his training, but at present they were a good twenty minutes’ flying time from Ryder, and Robbie had used up quite a lot of fuel showing off in order to humiliate Andy. The F-5E didn’t carry much juice in the first place, so Robbie had to be getting low. That would mean he’d be reluctant to go full military throttle, never mind use his afterburner, which would give Andy the advantage in a dogfight.
“Mustang flight, where you all going?” Bartlett suddenly complained. “Goddammit! Has the whole world gone crazy?”
Andy glanced back over his shoulder to see that the rest of the flight was eagerly following him to see the outcome of this contest. He felt better knowing his friends were around. It was like they were a good omen.
It’s going to be okay, Andy thought as he checked his sheet of radio call frequencies, and then tuned in to talk to Robbie on the Attackers channel. “Knight seven,” Andy began transmitting. “Fight’s on, Seven. I’m gonna turn you into deep-fried chicken Kiev!”
The black F-5E banked sharply in reply. Andy gritted his teeth against the G’s he was pulling as he put the Stiletto into its own tight bat-turn in order to stay with Robbie. The horizon tilted and Andy’s stomach corkscrewed. The sweat popped out on his brow as his G-suit inflated around his legs and gut to keep his blood from pooling around his ankles. But then the discomfort he was experiencing was rewarded as he watched the black F-5E that was looming in his HUD display begin to sli
de toward the ghostly green circle of his gunsight.
Robbie must have sensed Andy’s gunsight closing in on him. The F-5E’s tail pipes glowed orange as Robbie accelerated. Andy, watching the little black bird strain to get away, smiled to himself: You can’t win the game that way, Robbie.
Andy carefully inched forward his own throttle—the Stiletto’s speed superiority was such that if he wasn’t careful he’d overshoot—and settled in for a cross-sky, turning pursuit. As the gap closed between the Stiletto and the F-5E, Andy wondered how it could be so easy. Hell, he could call a Sidewinder kill right now….
He decided against it. Make-pretend missile kills without third-party electronic confirmation calls were at best inconclusive, forcing the combatants to play the “I got you/you missed me” game. Another few seconds and Andy would be close enough to call a guns kill. That way his win would be definite, and Robbie’s humiliation would be that much more intense.
Andy smiled as he saw Robbie drop his black bird’s nose toward the tan and brown desert, now 20,000 feet below. He guessed that Robbie was diving in the hopes that the F-5E could trade some of its altitude for extra speed. The move was a desperate one, and convinced Andy that the supposedly hot-shit Major Robert Blaize Greene was clearly out of ideas and anxious to put some distance between himself and the Stiletto in order to buy a little time to think.
Andy increased his own speed as he dropped the Stiletto’s nose in order to follow Robbie down. He wanted to end this dogfight in record time. After all, people were watching.
