Just trust me, skipper.
Four words that could not have been more carefully crafted.
It took him back eighteen years, to a mission over Spangdahlem, Germany. Green had been a rising major, an instructor pilot, and Davis a green first lieutenant. They were flying a pair of F-16s, tearing through the sky on a five-hundred-knot low-level run, three hundred feet above the ground. The world was rocketing past, a Star Wars onrush in the front windscreen, nothing but a blur in the periphery. Green’s job as flight lead was to navigate to the target, masking behind terrain and watching for obstacles. As the wingman, Davis had but one sacred duty — hang tight.
They were twenty miles from the target that day when the weather began to deteriorate. The ceiling above was a hard deck, a thousand feet over their heads at the beginning of the route. Yet slowly, insidiously, the clouds crept lower, and when their canopies began skimming the bottoms at three hundred feet, Green did the only sage thing. He rocked his wings, bringing Davis into close formation, and aborted the run, the two fighters climbing into the gray overcast as one.
It was a standard contingency plan — a weather route abort. Everything pre-briefed and by the book. Davis was rock solid, his wingtip two feet from Green’s as they climbed at full thrust into the soup. Then everything went wrong. Green became distracted. He tried to raise air traffic control on the radio for a new clearance, tried to enter new navigation points in his jet’s computer, all while flying a smooth platform for his wingman. With so much to do, he never noticed the problem.
In military aviation it is referred to as spatial disorientation, or spatial-D. When the horizon disappears and clouds take over, sight naturally becomes secondary to seat-of-the-pants sensory inputs. Vestibular and tactile responses try to take over, but they are unreliable for orientation. That being the case, pilots are trained to fly on instruments, exactly as Green had done that day. But they are also trained to cross-check gauges, and in those very busy moments Green had come up short. He didn’t recognize that his primary artificial horizon had failed — a one-in-a-million anomaly the mechanics later told him.
Fortunately, on that morning, he had a one-in-a-million wingman.
When flying close formation in the weather, a wingman has but one inviolate duty — don’t ding your multimillion dollar wing-tip on the other only inches away. It is a time for absolute focus, for constant small corrections and hand-eye coordination, allowing only the briefest of moments to glance at anything else in the world. But Davis did glance.
The radio exchange remained fixed in Green’s mind like it was yesterday.
Davis in a calm voice, “Bones 21, 22.”
Green replied with slight irritation. He was a busy man. “Go ahead 22.”
“I’m showing a ninety-degree left bank.”
A lengthy pause.
Green remembered looking at his primary attitude indicator, and seeing everything straight and level. But then a glance at his standby instrument showed them turning on their heads. “Uh… standby, Bones 22.”
There is perhaps no more sickening feeling in the world than to be rocketing though the clouds at four hundred knots, only to realize you have no idea which way is up.
Davis’ voice again, as still as a mountain, “You okay, Bones 21? We’re nearly inverted, nose coming down.”
“My ADI is messed up!” Green recalled the terrible feeling, his head uncaged and spinning like a top as he tried to cross-check and correlate conflicting information. Airspeed, heading, rate of descent. Big rate of descent. And most important of all, altitude — the precise distance between two fragile jets and some very hard German countryside. A distance that was fast approaching zero.
“Give me the lead, Bones 21!” Not a fault in the mountain — but definite urgency.
“Bones 22, you have the lead!”
Davis’ sleek fighter edged forward and the transition came. Green became the wingman, Davis his only reference to the misty outside world.
Later that night in a quiet debriefing in the squadron bar, and with both men less than sober, they talked about the recovery. Davis had referenced his instruments and confirmed they were screaming toward the ground. There was no time for calculation, no time to estimate the rate of pull-up necessary for survival. Davis could have pulled for all he was worth, a nine-G panic-yank on the controls that would have left a hopelessly disoriented Green alone and pointed toward the earth’s mantle at just over the speed of sound. If he had done that, Davis would have saved his own ass, and no accident board in the world would have faulted him. He told Green after their third Jäger shot that he really didn’t know the elevation in that area. The ground might have been twenty feet above sea level, might have been two thousand. But Davis, in his first ever maneuver as a flight lead, didn’t leave his wingman for dead.
He’d gone for a metered pull-up, a smooth and steady acceleration that began like a kid’s roller coaster and finished like an orbital reentry. On the initial pull, with his orientation still sideways, Green had bobbled in formation for just an instant. That was when he heard the voice again. Steady and true.
“Just trust me, skipper.”
And Green had.
They’d bottomed out that day at two hundred feet — Green knew because they briefly broke out underneath the clouds before climbing back into the muck for an uneventful recovery. If Davis had pulled just a bit harder he would have lost Green. If he’d pulled a little less they would have ended up as a pair of smoking holes in perfect formation.
In that critical moment, Jammer Davis had played it perfectly.
There was never any formal report of the incident. Aside from one maintenance write-up on Green’s jet to have a faulty attitude system repaired, the events of that day remained between the two of them.
Now Green wondered what new fog he was flying into, wondered which way was up as he sat behind his desk at L’Enfant Plaza. Davis was walking a tightrope in Colombia, and Green wanted desperately to help him. Up against them were strange undercurrents. He was getting heat from above for information, and Davis’ hesitation to provide it was obvious. Stuck in between, Green knew where his allegiance lay.
Just trust me, skipper.
Between the two of them it was a private message. An inseparable bond.
Larry Green would do anything for the man who’d saved his life on that bleak autumn day over Germany. Like most who attain the rank of general, he was an action-oriented individual, a Type A who didn’t enjoy sitting on the sidelines while his troops engaged in battle. Sometimes, however, you had to do exactly that. Jammer had a daughter at stake, which meant Colombia was his war. But if a time came when he needed reinforcements, Green would be ready, because the bond worked both ways.
Jammer was trusting him as well.
At one that afternoon Davis boarded the hourly shuttle to the crash site.
Marquez demurred, remaining at headquarters in order to sling arrows at his latest targets — the identity of Captain Reyna, and the background of the accused hijacker, Umbriz. Davis knew he was useless for that campaign, his fitness for face-to-face interviews handicapped by the language barrier. All the same, when Marquez encouraged him to head back into the jungle, he wondered if that was where the colonel thought he’d be most useful, or if it was reflection of the vector their relationship had taken after the morning’s accusations. On the surface at least, professionalism ruled the day, but Davis sensed a new lens of mistrust between him and Marquez through which everything would have to be filtered.