Now, as senior weapons and tactics training officer of the Thirty-Seventh Tactical Group at Incirlik Air Base, it was Mace’s job to help train NATO crewmembers on how to fight together as a team. He had many crews rotate in from all over the world, including F-111s, and in the past few months he started to get MiG-27 and Sukhoi-17 planes and crews from the Ukraine and Lithuania training with NATO forces. He got to fly — and fix — them all, but he loved it. It was an exciting time to be in Turkey …
… that is, Mace thought, if it wasn’t for the Russians. The closer the Ukraine got to full integration with NATO and eventual full NATO membership, the testier and more forceful, even unpredictable, Russia was getting. At the same time, it seemed the United States was getting weaker by the day. Mace saw lots of Reservists at Incirlik, including units that he knew used to be active-duty ones but were now either full, partial, or Enhanced Reserve Program bases. Now was not the time to downgrade the military, he thought — it was time to gear up. All they had to do was check the winds.
As Mace gathered up his gear and stepped out of the cockpit of the Sukhoi-17, he was met by the group commander, Colonel Wes Hardin. “Hey, hotshot, how did it go?”
“Except for almost getting myself killed, great,” Mace replied.
“I saw on the range video,” Hardin said. “You had about a tenth of a second to live, you know that.”
“Sixty feet is as good as sixty miles. I take it by the way young Ivan is jumping around that we did good.”
“You did good. Two for two. You’re making it look too easy.” He motioned to a pod mounted on the right wing fixed section, inboard of the swiveling section of the wing. “The electronics interface pod worked good?”
“Sure did,” Mace said. The AN/AQQ-901 electronics interface pod was designed to give older Soviet-made aircraft the look and feel of modern warplanes by giving them all the necessary electronic “black boxes” in one easily installed unit that did not require massive aircraft modifications. The pod provided satellite navigation updates by the U.S. GPS or Russian GLOSNASS constellations; a ring-laser gyro for precise heading and velocity information; a MIL-STD data interface bus for precision weapons such as Western laser-guided bombs and inertially guided missiles; and sophisticated weapon targeting and monitoring capability.
Someday when the Ukraine joined NATO, it would have access to very sophisticated weapons like the British Tornado or the American F-16 and F-111 fighter-bombers, but for now they had to settle for their old Soviet equipment with a handful of high-tech electronics pods to bring them up to Western standards. Even so, it took nothing away from the Ukrainian crew’s ability to fly and fight.
“These Ukrainian kids are good,” Mace replied. “They need to fly their planes, not just drive them. They need to think in three dimensions. But once you show them how to do it, man, they go out and do it. I pity the next guy who has to fly with Kondrat’evich — he’s going to spend a lot of time upside down, I think. So who’s my next victim?”
“Nobody, Daren,” Hardin said. “I got news for you. I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but I got plenty of news.”
Mace had been expecting this ever since passing twenty years as an officer — he was not going to be allowed to make full colonel. “Get it over with, Wes. When’s my retirement party?”
“Last month,” Hardin said. “You were officially RIFed as of last month.”
The RIF, or Reduction in Forces, was the current Administration’s ongoing program to reduce the size of the U.S. military to below one million members by 1996. The cuts were far-reaching and relentless. Mace wasn’t surprised to find himself on the hit list, but now that it really hit him, it hit hard. “So when’s my DOS?”
“You don’t get a date-of-separation, Daren — you get a Reserve commission, effective last month,” Hardin said. “You got thirty days to decide whether you accept it or not. Your thirty days expires in … oh, about five minutes.”
“Hell, then let’s go to the club and celebrate my last few minutes in the service, Wes,” Mace said, “because I’m not accepting a Reserve commission. You work just as damn hard as an active-duty type, but for half the money. Tell our wonderful President and his crew, thanks but no thanks. Forget it. Let’s get drunk.”
“If you accepted the Reserve commission, it comes with a new assignment.”
“Who cares? I don’t want it,” Mace said, shaking his head.
“How about Maintenance Group commander of the 394th Air Battle Wing at Plattsburgh Air Force Base, Daren?”
Mace stopped and stared at Hardin. “I said I don’t … what did you say, Wes?”
“You heard me, hotshot,” Hardin said with a smile. “MG of the hottest base in the force. This is your base, my man, your plane. You developed the design data for the RF-111G reconnaissance and Wild Weasel variant, you test-flew the -111 with HARM antiradar missiles and photo pods on them. This is the assignment you should have gotten. You accept this, you’re sure to make full bird colonel in two to four years.”
“Isn’t this the unit that’s supposed to be prima donna central?” Mace asked. “Full of mama’s boys and weak-dicks …?”
“And flybabes too, Daren,” Hardin reminded him. “Six or seven women on the -111 side, including Paula Norton, the big-titted blonde who did the hot-pants poster a few months back, the ex-NASA astronaut …?”
“Shit, Wes, flying with women?” Mace said. “It’s just… ah, hell, weird. Especially in the -111, sitting side-by-side. It’s too strange.”
“Welcome to the new military, son.”
“And Furness, the first female combat pilot — she’s there, right?” Mace interjected. “A real winner, huh? Busts guys’ balls and eats ’em for lunch.”
“The Iron Maiden, Rebecca Furness.” Hardin laughed. “Yeah, she’s one of the flight commanders now, transitioning crews from training flight to mission-ready. I don’t know if ‘iron’ describes her ass or her chastity belt. Do you want to find out or not? Daren? What about it?”
But Mace wasn’t listening. That name … Rebecca … as well as the thought of returning to the RF-111G he loved so much … the RF-111G, the reconnaissance and Wild Weasel variant of the F-111G, which used to be known as the FB-111A.
He flew the F-111G years ago, during Operation Desert Storm — the only time the FB-111A/F-111G model had ever been flown in actual combat. He flew a combat mission on the morning of January 17, 1991, along with thousands of other Coalition forces — except he wasn’t part of Desert Storm. His classified mission was called something else. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to block it out. For so long now he had. And yet, in his heart, he knew he could never escape that terrible incident, even if he tried. It would always be a part of him. The memories seemed as real as yesterday.…
PART ONE
How good bad music
and bad reasons sound when
we march against an enemy.
ONE
U.S. Air Force major Daren J. Mace stripped off his oxygen mask and cursed in a voice loud enough to be heard over the scream of the engines and the high-speed windblast just a few inches away. “The damned stealth fighters missed. They fuckin’ missed. Our mission’s been executed.” Mace waved a slip of paper he had just pulled from a satellite communications printer. His aircraft commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parsons, sitting to Mace’s left in the close confines of their fighter-bomber cockpit, wore a stunned expression.