“Roger. We have an emergency recovery team in place to assist you. The landing zone will be marked by vehicles, and we have a mobile BAK-6 arresting cable set up with a line of trucks marking its location. Land well short of the cable. Check hook extended now.”
Mace reached across Parsons and pulled a yellow hook-shaped handle. With all the other warning and caution lights illuminated on the front panel, Mace almost missed the new one: HOOK EXTEND. “Hook is down,” he radioed.
“Confirmed,” the Tornado crew added.
“Say gross weight, Breakdance.”
“Estimating five-five thousand.”
“Status of weapon bay stores.”
“Unknown,” Mace replied. “One store may be hot.”
“We copy,” Ramrod replied. There was a long, strained pause; then: “Breakdance, do you require assistance to complete your checklists?”
“What I need is to get this beast on the ground,” Mace replied. He took a few deep breaths, trying to flush the nervousness out of his eyes and hands, then said, “No, I think I got everything I can. I’m flying upright, the gear is down, and I’m cool for now. Over.”
“We’re about thirty miles out,” the pilot aboard the RAF Tornado radioed. “Let’s try a controllability check, shall we? Slow to your computed approach speed and let’s have a go.”
“Let’s,” Mace replied curtly.
His computed approach speed of 195 knots — about 60 nautical miles per hour faster than normal — wasn’t that much slower than the airspeed he was flying right now, but the effect on his control just by pulling off a little power was dramatic. Immediately the nose came up, the stall-warning buzzer sounded, and the F-111G sank like the anchor on an aircraft carrier. He had to shove in military power to get his airspeed back up above 185. Through it all, the Tornado stayed on his wing, matching his airspeed swings and threatening to send himself crashing in the desert. “Sorry about that,” Mace offered as he climbed back up to two thousand feet and accelerated back to a comfortable, stable 220 knots.
“Pulled off a bit too much too fast, I think,” the Tornado pilot said. “Not recommended for a normal approach, but keep it in mind if you have a short-field approach. Any serious vibrations or directional control problems?”
“No.” Mace replied. “Let’s give it another shot — can’t do much worse. Ready?” No reply. “Elvis, you ready?” Still no reply. Then he saw the Tornado pilot point to the side of his helmet, tapping his earpieces, and Mace knew what had happened even before he looked back into the cockpit. He punched the MASTER CAUTION light out and found the RGEN and UTIL HOT caution lights illuminated. With one engine running, the primary hydraulic system from the one good engine had to supply power to the entire aircraft. Because of this, it was easy to overload it, as Mace had obviously done with his recovery efforts.
Now the system was in “isolate,” which meant that the backup hydraulic system had activated and only a few vital systems were getting hydraulic power — namely, the stabilators, which controlled pitch and roll. Since the electrical generators ran on hydraulic power as well, all electrical systems were out now. Mace tried switching to battery power only, which powered radio one, but when he keyed the mike, nothing happened. The game was just about over. It was all up to the Tornado crew now to get him to the recovery base.
A few minutes later they did reach the recovery base — except it wasn’t a base. They had descended to one thousand feet and had first aimed right at a group of trucks parked alongside a highway. But when the Tornado began a right turn and started to parallel the highway, Mace knew what was happening — the highway was his recovery base. He was going to land on the highway!
The Tornado pulled ahead of Mace’s F-111G for the last two left-hand turns, keeping his airspeed up to two hundred knots for maximum controllability in the turns and making sure the maneuvers were gentle and easy. They lined up perfectly on the highway after the last turn on final. Three trucks on either side of the highway marked the BAK-6 arresting cable location, and off in the distance a few more trucks blocked the highway just before a curve — a little less than two miles available.
Once they turned onto final, all Mace had to do was keep up with the Tornado. The backseater was watching him intently for any other signs of danger.
Mace couldn’t keep the damn throttle steady. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t find a power setting that maintained the proper glide angle. Every tiny pitch change required a power adjustment, which changed his altitude, which required another pitch and power change to compensate. Several times he found himself well above the Tornado, and once he was so high that he lost sight of it. While the Tornado’s approach was a straight line, Mace’s approach was a series of roller-coaster hills that—
Suddenly the pilot pointed forward. Mace looked up. He was still twenty, maybe thirty feet above the highway — well above the touchdown point. Mace tried a last-ditch dive for the cable, yanking the nose up just before the nose gear hit, but the hook bounced off the pavement and missed the arresting cable.
“Breakdance, negative cable! Negative cable!” Ramrod shouted on the radio. “Go around! Go around!”
Mace didn’t hear the warning, but he knew his landing attempt had gone horribly wrong. He shoved the power back in on the good engine and tried to raise the nose, but the control stick felt as heavy as an iron girder and the nose wasn’t moving up. He had no choice — he was going to land.
The line of trucks blocking the highway at the curve seemed to be right in front of him. Although they were still at least a mile and a half away, at his speed he would close that distance in a hurry. Mace tried to ease the big bomber down with small power changes, but thermals coming off the highway were buoying him up, refusing to let him settle gently to earth. He was high and fast, with no highway left. When he reached the trucks ahead, both he and Parsons would die in a spectacular ball of fire. He had only one chance left to save himself… Please, God, he prayed silently, don’t let the nukes blow.…
Mace chopped the throttle to idle and pulled the wing-sweep handle back to the 54-degree lockout. That dumped every last erg of lift remaining in the F-111G, and it sank tailfirst almost straight down. The sudden power loss shut down the backup hydraulic system, and Mace suddenly had no directional control at all — he was at the hands of the gods, the same ones that Daren Mace had been pissing off almost all his life.
The tail feathers surrounding the engine exhaust nozzles hit first, crunching the metal against the destroyed engine and instantly igniting some fuel or hydraulic fluid and starting a black, smoky fire in the aft engine section. The main trucks hit hard, blowing the right tire and starting a small fire in the aft wheel well. The nose hit third, the partially extended nose gear collapsed instantly, and Mace was thrown so hard against his shoulder straps that he lost his breath. The fiberglass radome snapped, broke free, and crashed into the windscreen, destroying what was left of it before flying off.
Still traveling well over 150 miles an hour, the F-111G left the highway and careened out into the desert, threatening to tumble like a mobile home caught in a tornado. The bomber began to spin on its blown right wheel, then on its nose digging into the sand, and finally came to rest nearly a mile past its touchdown spot, buried up to the cockpit in sand.
It took several long moments for Mace to get his wind back — the sudden smell of burning fuel and rubber immediately invaded his half-conscious senses and quickened his recovery. The bomber, with two AGM-131X nuclear-tipped missiles and about fifteen hundred gallons of jet fuel on board, was on fire.
Mace’s first impulse was to run, to get away from the burning plane before something blew — but his pilot, Robert Parsons, was also on that plane. He might be dead, especially after the crash, but he couldn’t just leave him in the plane to fry. Instead, he hobbled around the decimated nose to Robert Parsons. His restraints had failed on impact and he was slumped over his lap, blood covering his legs and chest, but with the bomber tipped over onto its left side it was easy to pull him free of the plane. With strength he didn’t know he possessed, Mace dragged the pilot out across the desert nearly a hundred yards before his strength drained away and he collapsed on the sand.