The Hot Pilots (14 page)

Harrison’s fists clenched. And, perhaps, not even from his wife’s bed …

I want … I need … something
, Harrison thought angrily.
Something to solidify my position on all fronts
—

The answer when it came to him seemed so astoundingly simple: another child! A boy, he hoped; a son of his own, one to fill
the role and assume the surname that Robert Blaize Greene had so decisively rejected. Another grandchild would bring Harrison
closer to Herman, thereby weakening Steven’s hold on his father. It would no longer be two against one at home. Two against
one at GAT.

The few times the subject of children had come up, Susan had been hesitant. “… All in good time …” she’d said. “… We mustn’t
rush … Too many changes for Robbie to absorb … We must consider Robbie’s feelings …”

Well
, Harrison thought.
The time was now, and Robbie would just have to deal with it because change was in the wind
.

Harrison knew he could prevail upon Susan. She would not, could not, deny him on this.

A son, of my own
, Harrison thought.
Yes
.

Suzy didn’t know it yet, but they were going to have a baby.

Steven Gold leveled off at ten thousand feet in his F-90 BroadSword jet fighter. Below him Whetstone’s corrugated steel hangars
looked like tin cans half buried in the sand. The CIA compound’s tents looked like scraps of cloth, and its airstrip looked
like a two-by-four plank of lumber lying at an angle against the tan and brown desert terrain.

Steve looked out past his BroadSword’s gleaming, swept-back starboard wing, and saw the tiny black cross on the airstrip’s
ready line begin to crawl forward. He clicked his throat mike. “Chase Two, this is Chase Leader. Mayfly is taking off. Come
on home, Chase Two. It’s time to go to work.”

There was a crackle of static from the earphones built into Steve’s helmet, and then, “Roger, Chase Leader. This is Chase
Two. I’m coming around.”

Steve swiveled his head beneath the BroadSword’s teardrop canopy until he saw Chase Two—the F-90 being piloted by Captain
Chet “Lowball” Boskins—glinting in the sunlight as it made its sweeping turn back toward Whetstone.

“Say there, Lieutenant Colonel,
sir
,” Boskins began in his easygoing Texas drawl. “Since I’m a Mayfly pilot in training, and technically no longer in the Air
Force, do I still have to take orders from you?”

“I happen to be the highest-ranking Air Force pilot at Whetstone,” Steve joked.

“You’re also the
only
Air Force pilot,” Boskins radioed back.

Steve laughed. It was true. The other Air Force personnel were either aircraft maintenance or aero-medicine specialists. Everyone
else was either CIA, and that now included the Mayfly pilots, or GAT personnel—instructors or technicians—here to qualify
the men that Steve had recruited to fly the Mayfly spy plane.

“Would you pokey little BroadSwords mind getting out of my way?” the Mayfly’s pilot, Lieutenant Mel Evans, cut in. “I happen
to be in a real airplane, here, and I’ve got places to go.”

Steve banked his BroadSword to starboard in order to give the matte black, high altitude reconnaissance jet plenty of sky
as it soared past on its incredibly long, thin, glider plane’s wings. “I’ve seen it a few times already,” Steve confided to
Boskins, “but I still can’t get used to the way that blackbird can climb.”

“Affirmative,” Boskins replied. “I’ll never forget my first Mayfly flight. I left the ground and she acted like she wanted
to go straight up. You’ve got to experience it to believe it.”

Not much chance of that
, Steve thought. The CIA was very careful about who it allowed to drive its brand new toys.

For the last eighteen months Steve had been traveling across the country and around the world, visiting SAC air bases to chase
down leads concerning likely pilot recruits. Once the Air Force and CIA gave him the okay on a particular guy, Steve would
meet with him, explain about the problem the U.S. was having monitoring the Russians, and then pitch the Mayfly program. If
the pilot was interested—and most of them were; these men were patriots—the Air Force gave him temporary leave from his present
assignment to undergo a battery of psychological and physical tests to certify his fitness for the job. Those pilots who passed
were then released from the military, with the promise that they’d be reinstated with no time lost for promotion or retirement,
and given financially lucrative, two-year contracts with the CIA.

Next stop for the accepted pilots was Whetstone, for a lengthy and difficult course in Mayfly driving. The spy plane’s outstanding
abilities also made her a fragile and temperamental bird, quick to punish those who did not treat her with a full measure
of respect.

Steve moved his BroadSword into position on the Mayfly’s starboard wing while Boskins put his BroadSword on the spy plane’s
port side. The slender black bird was climbing fast, heading toward California. The two F-90s kept escort as long as they
could, but within minutes the Mayfly was effortlessly climbing past 47,000 feet, operational ceiling for the BroadSwords.

“Blackbird, we are running out of sky,” Steve radioed to the Mayfly pilot.

“Affirmative, Chase team,” Lieutenant Evans called. “You boys get downstairs before you get yourselves nosebleeds. I got some
flying to do …”

Steve watched Evans’s albatross-winged, black dagger of an airplane climb ever higher, dwindling away until the Mayfly’s tail
pipe was a distant glowing speck; a twinkling star in the desert sky.

“She’s gone for about six hours,” Boskins said.

“It must be something to fly so high you can almost reach out and touch the stars,” Steve murmured. The Mayfly could carry
its pilot to seventy thousand feet: higher than any man had gone before. As a matter of fact, the opportunity to break altitude
records was one of the selling points Steve had used in persuading some of the Air Force’s top pilots to sign on as Mayfly
driver.

“Say, Steve,” Boskins began as he maneuvered his Broad-Sword into position on Steve’s wing. “You flew a Broad-Sword in Korea—?”

“Affirmative.”

“She was supposed to be one hell of a dogfighter in MIG Alley,” Boskins continued.

“Well, I’m a little prejudiced, considering that she’s GAT-built, but in my opinion she had her moments …”

“I sure would like the chance to see what she can do,” Boskins said hopefully. “I’ve always felt like I missed out on the
real fun, getting stuck flying ground support in a Shooting Star in Korea …”

Steve knew that the soft-spoken Texas jet jockey had earned his nickname because of his penchant for bringing in his F-80
low, and
staying
low, to more effectively bomb and strafe the North Koreans off the face of the earth. During his combat tours Lowball Boskins
had proven that he had the guts to concentrate on the dangerous task at hand, steadily driving his airplane where he was told
to drive it, and keeping it there until he was satisfied that he’d done his job. He’d been one of the first pilots Steve had
recruited for the Mayfly program.

“I’d think a slow mover like this BroadSword would be boring to a hotshot, F-404 Starscythe jockey like yourself,” Steve mused.
Boskins had been stationed in Germany in a TAC fighter squadron, helping to keep a wary eye on the Red Bear, when Steve had
looked him up.

“The F-404 is fast, all right,” Boskins replied. “But the BroadSword is legendary for what it can do in a furball mixup. I’ve
always had a hankering to see what
I
could do with her…”

Steve looked around. The clear blue sky was empty of traffic, and below them there was nothing but miles of parched desert.
“Tell you what, Captain. I don’t see any harm in us burning up some kerosene playing tag.”

“Just what I wanted to hear,” Boskins exclaimed joyously. At that instant he popped his speed brakes, dropping back onto Steve’s
tail. “Ah, Lieutenant Colonel, sir? Don’t look now, but you got one bad ass pilot on your six o’clock—”

Not for long
, Steve thought. He cobbed his throttle and his BroadSword pulled away. Steve watched in his rearview mirror as Boskins began
closing fast on his stern, and then Steve broke right, across his attacker’s nose. Taken by surprise, Boskins began to overshoot.
As Boskins followed Steve’s turn in order to try and regain his position, Steve barrel-rolled. Boskins overshot, and Steve
dropped down onto Boskins’s tail.

Steve clicked his throat mike. “Rat-tat-tat, ole buddy. You’re taking hits.” Of course his BroadSword had no guns, or even
a gun sight, but Steve had flown enough combat missions in F-90s to know when he was within kill range.

“Fuck!” Steve heard Boskins swear. Boskins began jinking his F-90, trying to throw off Steve’s imaginary aim, and then dropped
down into a steep dive toward the desert floor.

Steve stayed glued to Boskins’s six o’clock, but as he followed Boskins down he was mindful of his altimeter unwinding. Fun
was fun, but he didn’t want Boskins getting carried away and drilling a hole in some cactus down there …

He needn’t have worried. At fifteen thousand feet Boskins abruptly pulled up, causing Steve to shoot past as he hurried to
come out of his own dive. Now Boskins was behind him, and likely licking his chops as he closed on Steve’s tail: It wasn’t
a bad maneuver, just a basic and easily stymied one.

Boskins was about to drop down on his tail when Steve flipped the switch on his throttle, extending his own speed brakes.
His BroadSword shuddered as it reared up in the sky. Boskins flashed past. Steve clicked the switch again and hauled in his
brakes. He cobbed the throttle and once again settled down nicely onto Boskins’s six o’clock.

“Rat-tat-tat, ole buddy.”

“You keep saying that,” Boskins muttered.

For the next ten minutes Boskins must have tried everything he knew—which wasn’t much—and none of it worked. That didn’t make
Steve feel good; it worried him. He knew that Boskins was one of the Air Force’s best fighter jocks, but Lowball had been
trained in combat tactics well after the Korean War. Steve knew the current theory fresh from the think tanks of the desk
jockeys who made the rules: Guns on fighters were obsolete. Today’s Mach-two interceptors would engage the enemy over enormous
distances—perhaps even out of visual range—blowing him out of the sky with radar-controlled air-to-air missiles. Let the machines
do the work, the desk jockeys were saying. Let the pilot come along for the ride, if you must, but put blinders on his eyes
to keep him glued to his ghostly green radar screens, and certainly don’t waste the money we could use to buy more computers
by taking the time to teach him aerobatics …

“I quit,” Boskins said dejectedly, slowing down and coming around to head back toward Whetstone.

“Roger,” Steve replied, relinquishing his six o’clock to pull alongside Boskins, who was staying very quiet. Steve could imagine
how bad the guy was feeling. “Hey, buddy. Don’t take it so hard.”

“I couldn’t break away from you once …”

“Don’t forget I’ve logged hundreds of combat hours in this bird,” Steve said. He thought,
And while you were in college, I was learning how to maneuver, not punch buttons on some computer
.

“I’m going to be hearing rat-tat-tat in my fucking sleep,” Boskins sighed.

“And I’ve heard the
real
thing,” Steve reminded him softly. “And that makes a difference. Anyway, think how badly you would have waxed me if we’d
been flying Star-scythes.”

“Yeah! That’s right!” Boskins brightened. “Once I got a radar lock on you it would have been bye-bye, Lieutenant Colonel …”

Maybe, but then again, maybe not
, Steve thought. At least he’d managed to salvage a little of Boskins’s self-respect. The one vital piece of equipment the
Air Force hadn’t yet figured out how to take away from a fighter jock was his ego …

Steve stood in the motor pool’s doorway, waiting for the kid to bring around the Jeep he had requested. It was high noon;
the thermometer mounted on the doorjamb read one hundred degrees, but Steve was willing to wager that the parched air inside
the motor pool’s corrugated steel building was far hotter than that.

Steve was wearing a USAF, rescue crew/test pilot issue, Indian orange, cotton flight suit, low-heeled black cowboy boots,
and an Air Force flight satin baseball cap in blue, on which he wore his silver oak leaf. While he waited for his jeep he
glanced again at the creased scrap of paper Captain Chet Boskins had left for him in his mailbox at the compound’s Administration/Communication
hut:

Urgently request that you meet me at the cave/1200 hours Steve, please be there!!!

—Lowball

Here it was already a little after noon, and it was going to take another ten minutes to drive to the cave, Steve brooded
as he pondered the note’s urgent, almost panicked tone. He wondered what was wrong? It wasn’t like Lowball to lose it…

A Jeep came around the corner, pulling up in front of the motor pool. A young, blond, freckle-faced airman with a badly sunburned
pug nose put the jeep in neutral, set the parking brake, and hopped out, leaving the engine running.

“Sorry for the delay, sir.” He gestured over his shoulder toward the Jeep. “It took some doing to find her.”

“No problem,” Steve lied, thinking that it wasn’t this kid’s fault the compound was short on vehicles, or that Steve didn’t
have a Jeep personally assigned to him. He wasn’t permanently stationed at Whetstone. He’d been there only a few weeks, and
would be back in Washington in a few more days.

As Steve settled into the driver’s seat he noticed that there was no key in the ignition. “Airman?”

The kid saw him looking at the tangle of wires drooping down from beneath the metal dashboard, and smiled apologetically.
“Actually, sir, I
couldn’t
find an available vehicle, so I kind of borrowed this one from Mister Cooper.”