This had to be part of the exercise — they flew many air defense exercises through the years, going supersonic down over the ocean and letting F-16 fighters from Burlington or Massachusetts try to find them. But why were they supposed to go out there, especially with live (albeit only ten-pound BDU-48 “beer can”) weapons aboard Zero-Four? Were they supposed to dump the weapons into the sea? If so, why didn’t they just tell them to do so?
“Control, Zero-One, stand by for authentication.” To Fogelman, Furness said, “Mark, get out the decoding documents and check this message.”
“What?” he asked, perplexed.
“The command post wants us to fly out over ocean,” she told him, explaining it all to him as if he hadn’t heard any of it. “I want to authenticate their instructions.”
“Jesus Christ…” Fogelman muttered as he removed his lap and shoulder belt so he could twist all the way around in his seat. The classified decoding documents were in a small canvas carrying bag that he had stuffed in the retractable lunch-box bucket behind the seat. You had to be a contortionist to reach it. The bag had enough decoding documents to last them for the rest of the month, including unlocking documents for nuclear weapons.
When he had finally retrieved the bag, he tossed it onto Furness’ lap while he strapped back in. She opened the encode/decode book to the proper day’s page, selected two characters, and found the proper response character. “Control, Thunder Zero-One, authenticate bravo-juliett.”
“Thunder control authenticates yankee.” It was the proper response.
“Holy shit,” Furness muttered on the interphone. “If this is some kind of a test, I don’t get it. They just ordered us to go VFR to an orbit point out over the Atlantic Ocean. We’re supposed to try to raise Zero-Two and Zero-Three while they’re in the low-level route and have them join on us.”
“I guess our low-level has been canceled,” Fogelman said. “Maybe they’re going to pass us some recon information for a maritime target. That’ll be cool — get target information from headquarters via AFSATCOM while the ‘war’ is going on. Near real-time stuff.”
That explanation was as good as any, and Rebecca accepted it. “Boston Center, Thunder Zero-One flight of two would like to cancel IFR at this time.”
The controller’s mike opened, there was a short hesitant silence; then: “Ah, roger, Zero-One flight. Can you accept MARSA at this time?” MARSA stood for Military Accepts Responsibility for Separation of Aircraft, and it legally allowed military flights to fly in close proximity to one another.
“Thunder Zero-One accepts MARSA with Zero-Two.”
“Roger,” the controller said, a puzzled tone still in his voice. “I don’t know what it is, but you military types are dropping off the screens all over the place. Squawk 1200, maintain VFR hemispheric altitudes, monitor GUARD, frequency changed approved, good day.”
“Zero-One copies all, good day.” Fogelman set 1200 in the IFF Mode 3 window, which allowed the air traffic controllers to track the bombers and to maintain separation from other planes, but they were not under radar control. It was “see and avoid” for the rest of the day. Rebecca descended to 17,500 feet, the proper altitude for visual-flight-rules aircraft going eastbound. “Okay, they want us to use SATCOM for any more messages,” she told Fogelman, “so you can set the backup radio to SATCOM’ and I’ll keep the primary radio in the command post freq. I’ll—” Just then she noticed that the present-position readouts and all flight-data readouts had zeroed again. “Looks like your INS just rolled over.”
“Fuck,” Fogelman muttered. “Just my luck. I draw a piece-of-shit INS my first day of Hell Week.” Furness didn’t have the heart to tell him it was probably his system management that screwed the INS up. Both INS units seemed to have taken themselves off-line, so he shut down both of them, selected the satellite navigation system for the autopilot and system position and velocity reference, switched INS2 to ATTITUDE mode, then turned INS1 on and began an inflight alignment. The INS would use global positioning system present position, speed, and altitude to begin coarse alignment. It would take twice the effort to maintain the navigation system, and it might never tighten down completely. Fogelman still had a lot to learn about the navigation system — it worked better if just a few quality radar fixes and GPS comparisons were put in, rather than a lot of poor or mediocre radar fixes.
The common post frequency was buzzing a few minutes later as the two bombers overflew the base — Rebecca tried to check in with them, but received only a hurried “Thunder control, unable at this time, out,” when she requested an update on their landing time or to check if they had contacted Zero-Two and Zero-Three in the low-level route. “That’s weird … I guess the exercise must be heating up,” she said on interphone. “Some sort of big-time readiness test or something, I bet. Getting a late takeoff and two aborts to start the ball rolling didn’t help.”
“These exercises are a waste anyway.” Fogelman sighed. He had been working hard on the navigation system, punching fixes in every ten minutes or so — far too many, in her opinion. “We practice too much and don’t spend as much time flying and dropping real bombs. If they had only two mobilization exercises a year and spent the money they’d save on live bombs and flying time, we’d get more out of these reserve weeks. At least that’s how it seems to me.”
“You’re probably right,” Furness agreed, “but mobility is what we do. That’s our mission.”
“Come on, Furness,” Fogelman said. “Everyone talks mobility, but do you think they’d ever deploy RF-111s? They’d need half the airlift in the inventory to take our support gear — and that’s not including the photointel trailers. Sure, we might deploy to England, to the old F-111 bases in Lakenheath or Upper Heyford, or deploy to Guam, but nowhere else. We’re playing the numbers game, that’s all. We’re keeping F-111s in the inventory just to show that we’re not getting complacent about national or global defense. The F-15Es, the B-1s, the B-2 bombers, the B-52 or ship-launched cruise missiles — those guys get all the glory. We just get to play mobility.”
“Well, well, Fogman really does have an opinion about national defense issues,” Furness chided him, “even if it is motivated by laziness and a total give-a-shit attitude. You really have given this some thought, haven’t you?”
“All I care about,” Fogelman said, unaffected by either Furness’ compliment or her backhanded barb, “is doing my job and getting my ass on the ground. You know what your problem is?”
“I can’t wait to hear.”
“You got this romantic notion about flying and this job,” Fogelman said. “You’d sacrifice your business, your personal life, all the real stuff in your life, for the Reserves. Do you think they care about your sacrifice? The Reserves will keep on taking until you got nothing left — no career, no job, no future. Then, just when you’ve hit bottom, they’ll RIF you, just like they did back in ’92. You think they’re going to let any female Reserve flyer under the rank of colonel make it to retirement? They’ll kick your butt out or make life so miserable for you that you’ll quit before you collect all your retirement points. Meanwhile you’ve lost your charter business and your commercial license, you’re older, and you’re out of work. Thank you very much, Air Force Reserves. I’m not being cynical, just realistic.”
Furness admitted he had a point — the tough-ass dude in the bar the other night, obviously in the military and working nights as a maintenance man to make ends meet, came to mind — but she didn’t tell Fogelman that. “The solution to that, Mark,” she decided, “is to work harder at both jobs. I can make Liberty Air work, and I can make it to 0–6 in the Reserves.”