The sim froze again, the door opened, and a grinning Stigler crawled into the front cockpit while the test pilot took Raider’s position in the backseat. The test pilot was amazed at how well Stigler could fly the simulator and wondered what he would do in the real thing. On the first setup, the suspicion came to him. “Stig,” he said, “we need to switch cockpits.” After they were repositioned, the pilot continued. “When you hear me say ‘Knock it off,’ I want you to vote on the stick and push it forward, hard. The idea is that you want to lower the nose to see Pontowski’s jet.”
Again, they went through the setup and entered a scissors. Again, the angle of attack increased as their airspeed bled off. Finally, the exact position of the two jets was re-created. “Knock it off,” the pilot said. Stigler did as he had been told and pushed the stick in the rear cockpit forward with both hands, palms open. But the pilot instinctively tried to hold on to the stick. The contrary resistance sent the stick sideways out of his grasp. The simulator rolled under and downward to the left, creating the same angles that had puzzled the junior engineer. The test pilot had learned what had happened. “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Outside, the six men gathered around the table. The test pilot looked at them, a sad expression on his face. “From the backseat it looks hairy. They were flying at a low airspeed and a high angle of attack, but still had lots of control. They were not even close to departing controlled flight. The pilots had no trouble seeing each other but Raider would have lost sight of Pontowski’s jet under the nose. For an experienced wizzo, no problem. But now listen to the VCR tape just before impact.” He played the tape. “Just when Locke radioed for them to disengage with a ‘Knock it off’ call, Raider yelled the same thing. You can hear the panic in his voice. Then he voted on the stick, momentarily overriding Locke’s control, and crashed them into Pontowski’s wing.” The test pilot paused. “The only other explanation is that Locke committed suicide.”
“Is that a possibility?” Leander asked.
“No way,” the test pilot said. “I flew out of Ras Assanya with him when he brought the Forty-fifth home from the Persian Gulf. I knew him.”
The envelope was addressed to M. Courtney-Smith and waiting for her in the mailbox when she got home. Melissa checked the return address — it was the one she had been waiting for. Thanks, Joannie, she thought. An old friend, another secretary who had devoted her life to public service, had called from her office in the Pentagon and told her about the final report on Matt’s accident. Melissa had asked her to mail it to her and bypass the normal six or seven bureaucratic layers that would edit and change the report before it was judged to be sent to the White House.
Inside her apartment, she made a cup of tea and settled down to wade through the document. Her cat, Caesar, jumped into her lap and purred. Outside of her work, Melissa was a very lonely person. She was amazed at the clear and lucid way the report was written. The conclusions were hard and unyielding. “No wonder the milicrats in the Air Force won’t let these things go public,” she told the cat. Instinctively, she knew that the report would step on too many toes and raise some hard questions about how the Inspector General system selected the officers who conducted inspections.
Like most Air Force reports, the details and meat of the accident board’s findings were in the appendix. She flipped to the back and ferreted out details. The descriptions under the Cause of Death section brought tears to her eyes and she thought about the one man other than Zack Pontowski she had ever loved. Tom Dennison had been a Navy fighter pilot who had found a watery grave while making a night carrier landing in heavy weather. She remembered the way he had laughed when he told her, “Peacetime readiness inspections are like mess-hall cuisine — a contradiction in terms. No combat-ready unit ever passed an inspection.”
“Well, I know two people who should see this,” she told her cat. Then she thought about Fraser. “Perhaps, I should drop in on Mrs. Pontowski.” Caesar purred his approval.
Ambler Furry wandered through the squadron looking for Matt. He finally found his pilot alone in the Intelligence section, his head buried in a report on the combat capabilities of the new Soviet fighter, the Su-27 Flanker. “The squadron still avoiding you?” Furry asked and flopped his bulk down on the couch beside him.
“Yeah, like the plague.” Rather than talk about that, Matt changed the subject. “You know, the Intel weinies say I’m the first one in the squadron to read this.” He waved the report at Furry.
“It does get your attention, doesn’t it. Whatcha think?”
“It’s getting tough out there. Better than the MiG-Twenty-nine Fulcrum. I think they’ve finally got a counter to the Eagle.”
“Probably,” Furry allowed, “but they won’t use it right. To match us, they’ve got to train like we do and that means their pilots would have to learn to think for themselves. There’s no way the commissars will chance that. Hell, independent judgment goes against their basic doctrine and scares the hell out ‘em.”
“They can’t be that stupid,” Matt said.
“Well, they have been so far. Kinda encouraging, isn’t it?” Matt agreed with him. “Speaking of encouraging, I think you should read this.” Furry pulled a folded copy of the accident report out of a leg pocket on his flight suit and threw it at Matt. He sat and waited while the pilot read it. When Matt looked up, Furry was smiling.
“Shit hot!” Matt shouted. The report completely cleared him and laid the blame squarely on pilot error when Colonel Raider took unauthorized control of Locke’s aircraft. The bitterness that had soured Matt’s existence shattered as the self-doubts that had driven him to the edge of despair evaporated. He had not been responsible for the accident and there it was for all the world to see.
“Kinda encouraging, isn’t it?” Furry allowed. He got up to leave. “I’ll leave that copy for the squadron to read. Looks like you’re home free.”
For a moment, Matt was at a loss for words. “I think I’ll take some leave now and go home. My grandmother’s not well …”
“Can you hold off on that for a few days?” Furry asked. “We need to rub a few assholes in the dirt on an exercise we got coming up.” A wicked look crossed the wizzo’s face.
“I can do that.”
Furry grunted and turned to leave.
“Amb,” Matt said. “Thanks.”
“I’m so glad you came.” Tosh Pontowski smiled from her bed. She was sitting up and feeling much better. The surge of hope Melissa felt when she saw how much the President’s wife had improved brightened her smile. “Don’t be fooled,” Tosh told her. “This damn disease comes and goes. Right now it’s in remission.” She patted the bed beside her, wanting Melissa to sit close. The last thing the President’s wife wanted was sympathy. She considered her fight against lupus, which means “wolf” in Latin, her own personal battle.
The two women were old friends and for a few minutes talked and laughed about day-to-day life around the White House. Melissa could see Tosh grow tired as they talked and fought back her tears, thinking how unfair it was that such a vibrant woman who had given so much was being ravished by lupus. “I heard some good news about Matt,” Melissa said. She could see Tosh brighten. “The Air Force cleared him of the accident. A friend sent me a copy of the accident report. She thought we’d like to know right away. She said otherwise it would be weeks before we heard.” Both women knew that the Pentagon would “officially” release the report only after several layers of military bureaucracy had “chopped” on it. In the process of gaining each office’s approval, it would be heavily edited.