“We can’t give you any more fuel because your system says it’s full, Daren,” Furness added. “What have you got?”
“My fuel system is dead, so I don’t know what I got,” Mace said. “I can try manually transferring fuel, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You took on fifteen thousand pounds of fuel,” Furness reported, “and I see no leaks up here. We’ll follow you all the way to landing.”
“This should do me for at least three to four hours,” Mace said. “I think I’m done for now. Thanks again, BC.”
“Don’t mention it,” Furness said as she saw him wave at her. “See you when I see you.” Furness removed the headset, slumped in the seat, took a deep breath, and let it out in one expansive sigh.
“Good job, Captain,” Clintock said, then added with a mischievous smile, “For a lady, you got a lot of balls.”
“I just hope the brass sees it that way,” the chief master sergeant said as he took his seat beside Clintock again after Furness got out, “when they review those radio transmissions. And thank God we had a fighter out there with missiles on board, or else we’d be a flaming hole right now.”
“We got the -111 and the Tornado its gas,” Furness said. “That’s what we were ordered to do. Any other problems they have with my procedures are moot if the Aardvark makes it back in one piece.”
The chief shook his head but said nothing else.
Furness made her way back up to the forward passenger cabin to get back to her newspaper when she met up with the flight engineer and the pilot Marlowe again coming out of the cockpit. The engineer looked as white as a sheet, and specks of white and a large stain spread over the front of his flight suit. “Hey, Pete, what’s the matter?” The engineer made no reply, but avoided Furness’ eyes and hurried over to the lavatory. “What’s with him, Sam?”
Marlowe made sure the engineer made it, then turned angrily toward Furness. “He’s sick, that’s what, Furness,” Marlowe snapped. “He can barely stand up.”
“Why? What happened?”
“You’re what happened,” Marlowe said. “That attack by the fighter … it really rattled him. He’s scared shitless, all because of you. I was coming back here to advise you that I’m making a full report of this incident to the wing,” he said.
Furness’ smile disappeared in a fraction of a second. “You’re … what …?”
“You think you’re some kind of hero for refueling that bomber with enemy fighters in the area? Bullshit. I say you’re an egotistical prima donna that gets her kicks from breaking the rules when it suits her.”
“Well, you go right ahead and make your report, Marlowe,” Furness seethed. “I was ordered to refuel that bomber, and that’s what I did.”
“And you broke technical, procedural, and tactical rules to do it — not to mention putting this entire crew and this aircraft in jeopardy.”
“I didn’t put anyone in jeopardy,” Furness said. “In emergency situations we can continue the rendezvous.”
“We saw the damned fighter, Furness,” Marlowe said grimly.
Furness’ jaw dropped open in surprise. “You what …? How far? When …?”
“He was right there, less than three, maybe four miles away,” Marlowe said. “He was rolling in on us … Jesus, he fired on us, Furness, we saw him launch a missile at us! We couldn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t try to evade? You didn’t say anything?”
“It was too late to do anything,” Marlowe said. “By the time we saw him, he was coming at us and the missile was in the air. God, I don’t know how it missed us. The Tornado dropped a flare, and I think it went after the flare.”
“So the bandit was firing on the Tornado.”
“It was firing at us, Furness!” Marlowe shouted. “It shot at us! You set us up like a sitting duck for that bandit to shoot us down!”
Furness was completely speechless — she had no idea the fighter was so close: “Greg, the bomber reported the bandit outside lethal range.”
“That doesn’t mean shit, Furness. We don’t know from lethal or nonlethal range — we know ‘attack.’ We were under attack, and you ordered us not to evade.”
“You were on the flight deck, Marlowe,” Furness said. “You saw the bandit. You should have called a breakaway and begun evasive maneuvers.”
“Hey, that’s good, lady, that’s real good,” the stunned pilot retorted. “Blame it on me now. Just what I expected. You are the senior officer and the mission commander, you were talking on the radios over enemy territory when we were told to maintain radio silence, you ordered me not to evade, you told the receivers to stay in contact position — but now you’re blaming me for not doing something.”
Marlowe turned away, a look of resigned defeat on his face, and said, “Well, I was the pilot-in-command at the time, and I know I’m in charge when I’m in the left seat, so they’ll take me down too …” But then he snapped a look of pure anger at her and added, “But I’m going to make sure you go down with me, you bitch. And if they don’t bust you, I’ll make sure no one in the Command ever flies with you again.”
EIGHT
“Emergency-gear extension handle — pull,” Mace said half-aloud. He unwrapped the stainless steel safety wire from the yellow handle on the center forward instrument panel and pulled. Immediately the main gear-down lights came on steady green, but the nose-gear light was still out. Mace didn’t panic — yet. The emergency gear extension system used very high-pressure air to shove the gear out into the slipstream and throw the downlocks into place, but the book said that it might take much slower airspeeds, higher angles of attack, or as long as five minutes for the nose gear to come down because its shocks were so big.
“Your nose gear looks like it’s halfway down, my friend,” the British pilot aboard the Tornado chasing Mace radioed. They were just a few miles inside Saudi Arabian airspace, but no Iraqi fighters had dared to fly this far south yet so they were given permission to use the radios. The Tornado crew had configured their fighter-bomber to look exactly like Mace’s plane — clean wings (they had used their last two remaining Sidewinder missiles to kill the Iraqi fighter, which turned out to be a MiG-29—a very impressive kill considering that the MiG-29 was a front-line Soviet-made fighter, similar to the American F-15 Eagle, and the Tornado was a “mud-pounder” that happened to carry air-to-air missiles), gear down, and wings swept back to about 30 to 35 degrees. The Tornado was about thirty feet from Mace’s right wingtip, accomplishing some of the steadiest “welded-wing” formation flying Mace had ever seen.
“Yeah, I know,” Mace radioed back. “Fuckin’ thing is falling apart around my ears. I’ll give it a few more minutes.”
“Right,” the Tornado pilot replied skeptically. Judging by the tone of his voice, he strongly believed in Murphy’s Law—”if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”—and Mace’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law: “Emergency-Gear Extension Handles won’t.”
“Breakdance, this is Ramrod,” a new voice on the radio announced a few minutes later. “How do you hear?”
“Loud and clear,” Mace replied. Ramrod was a standard call sign for a maintenance officer at most Air Force bases, a sort of on-site foreman who coordinated all repair, supply, and emergency activities at a base during aircraft launch and recovery.