He leaned to the right and looked back toward the fuel trailers. Formsby emerged from his tent with a duffel bag, a bedroll, and a three-gallon can of gasoline. He crossed to the stack of crates and decorative tape, doused it thoroughly with gasoline, then struck a match.
The stack caught fire with a poof!
Formsby ran for the Hercules in his off-gaited ramble, went up the ramp, and then waved at the Phantoms before the ramp closed.
“Yucca, Wizard,” Demion said.
“After you, Wizard.”
The transport rolled slowly away, the props raising a cloud of fine dust, and Wyatt closed his canopy. The heat was intense, and his air-conditioning wasn’t very effective at idle, on the ground.
He called off the numbers, and the F-4s swung into line behind the Hercules. Wyatt went last.
They got off the ground in better fashion than they had in landing, though it seemed to take longer even in afterburner. The take-off roll was rough, bouncy, and long with the full load of ordnance. He was relieved when he felt the lift take over, and he pulled in his landing gear less than twenty feet off the ground.
He looked back once to see the bonfire raging next to the empty fuel tankers. If that fire got out of control, the fumes in those tanks would create a lot of shrapnel.
Jacque’s fifty grand, resting on Formsby’s cot, would go up in green smoke.
For Formsby’s reputation among the scum of the earth, Wyatt hoped the money didn’t burn.
He settled the Phantom in at a steady rate of climb of 150-feet-per-minute, and the whole formation ascended to twenty thousand feet. Aboard the Hercules, Kriswell and Formsby would be monitoring the threat receivers, but it was unlikely that there was a hostile, or friendly, radar set within a hundred miles of them.
Within twenty minutes, they caught up with Maal and the tanker. Wyatt eased the stick back, added power, and climbed to twenty-five thousand feet.
Looking down, he was pleased with the way the F-4s and the tanker blended into the landscape. They were damned hard to see, and if he hadn’t known they were there, he would probably have missed them.
By contrast, the transport stuck out like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The aluminium skin reflected the sun in piercing glints that hurt the eyes.
“You’re pretty obvious, Wizard,” he said.
“Not my fault,” Demion replied. “We could have used a water-based paint.”
“Shall we go back and get some?” Barr cut in.
“And miss the party?” Gettman asked.
“Okay,” Wyatt interrupted. “I’m sorry I got this started. Let’s can the chatter.”
Their transmissions were scrambled, but a listener who happened to catch their frequency while it was in use, though he wouldn’t understand the words, would certainly understand that there was something strange going on in the area.
Drifting along at 370 miles per hour, to stay with the C-130s at cruise, it took them an hour and a half to reach the border with Niger.
Formsby reported it. “That’s Niger down there, if you didn’t catch the change in landscape.”
In fact, the government of Niger really needed to draw a big black line on its borders. The slowly undulating, barren scrub land didn’t change at all.
“Yuccas,” Wyatt radioed, “I’m going to take a look ahead.”
He eased his throttles forward and gradually pulled out of the formation. Fifteen minutes later, the formation was out of sight behind him.
Wyatt used the NavStar Global Positioning System to establish his position, then checked it against the coordinates he had written in his notebook.
He eased into a left turn, taking up a heading of eighty-four degrees.
He also reduced the power setting and started a slow descent.
He was over Chad.
Directly south of him was the village of Wour. Farther south was the depressing and devastated area of the Bodele Depression.
The earth ahead of him didn’t look all that grand, either. The vegetation was almost non-existent, and as far as he could tell, there wasn’t one solid landmark that he would rely on. As soon as he locked his eyes on what he considered a hilltop, it dissolved into flatness.
He trusted to the readouts on his screen, and continued on course while he lost altitude. Libya, he was certain, was careful about patrolling its borders. The flights might be infrequent, but they would occur.
As he came within twenty miles of the Libyan border, he was flying at three hundred feet AGL, hopefully below any airborne radar coverage.
He almost missed it.
Blinking his eyes against the sunset glare off the desert, he picked it up again.
A single short airstrip.
It had been built, then later abandoned, by the French, who often found themselves assisting Chad in putting down aggression by its neighbours. There were two buildings, old hangars, but their roofs had caved in.
He flew low down the runway, noting the cracks in the asphalt and a few chuckholes along the right side. Midway down, there were a couple of gaping holes on the left side.
Incongruously, the remnants of an old wind sock still fluttered from a pole at the corner of one hangar. It hung dead still.
Wyatt leaned into a right turn.
“Wizard, Yucca One.”
“Go, One.”
“We don’t have a welcoming committee; we don’t have anything worth noting. We’re in business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Somewhat perilous. You’ll need to put down at oh-one-oh, and keep it tight to the left side of the strip. There’s a few holes on the right. Halfway down, veer slightly to the right, so you can miss the holes on the left side. Like the satellite snapshots told us, it’s short. We’ll be using the drag chutes.”
“You mind if I take a look for myself, before I try it?” Demion asked.
“Chicken,” Barr put in.
“Don’t waste fuel,” Wyatt said.
Formsby interrupted. “I happen to be on this bird, and I second your motion, James. That’s why I brought along a couple thousand extra gallons.”
Thirteen
Barr was the fourth one on final approach.
Far ahead he could see Gettman turn off the runway, dragging his arresting chute behind him.
With the sun low, the shadows were tricky. Black splotches on the earth, or on the runway, could be two inches deep or two feet deep.
He touched rudder and stick lightly and danced to the left, lining up on the left side of the runway.
Inched the throttles back and felt the fighter sag.
Selected full flaps.
The Phantom bounced upward with the added lift, but not excessively. She was carrying a full complement of weaponry, plus the drop tanks, and she was heavy. Under normal circumstances, the idea was to lose the bombs and missiles before landing.
Barr remembered an extended exercise he had taken part in when he was still an active military pilot. His squadron of Phantoms had moved to a hastily assembled training base in Panama to practice working out of a forward area airfield. The strip was short, utilizing PSP — Pierced Steel Planking — for a surface, and the landings were arrested, taking advantage of the F-4’s arresting hook. They did it like the Navy boys did it, except that the runway didn’t shift directions unexpectedly or act like a yo-yo.
On a day when they were using live ordnance — bombing a bunch of floating oil barrels chained together in the Pacific Ocean, he had a bomb hang-up. The nose of the bomb dropped, pulling the tethered cable, and allowing the small propeller on the nose to rotate and arm the bomb. The bomb’s rear hanger didn’t release from the pylon, however. His wingman told him the bomb was locked in place, with the nose at a forty-five-degree angle to the wing.