“I am buying time, Stork,” Cazaux said. “With the gear down, their fingers will stay off the cannon trigger — I hope. Keep this plane headed toward Sacramento or Stockton— any population center you can see. The longer we stay over populated areas, the less likely they will shoot.”
“Fly a heading of three-zero-zero for Mather Jetport,” the female Air Force pilot radioed. Mather Jetport was a former Air Force base that had been taken over by the county of Sacramento and turned into a commercial cargo and airliner maintenance facility. It had a long two-mile- long runway and was an Air National Guard helicopter gunship base. They would have plenty of firepower support to help capture Cazaux and secure the cargo plane. “You have two F-16 fighters on you now, both within one mile. Do not deviate from course unless instructed. Do you understand? Over.”
Cazaux keyed the microphone button: “Mais oui, mademoiselle. I understand. I do not know why you are doing this. You obviously have confused me with someone else. I have done nothing wrong. But I will follow your instructions. Can you activate your position lights, mademoiselle? I cannot see you.”
“I have visual contact on you just fine,” the Air Force pilot replied. “Stay off this frequency unless instructed to reply.”
It was the reply he was hoping for: “Mr. Krull, in the second pallet, gray metal case, a pair of night-vision goggles. Get them quickly.” On the radio, Cazaux continued: “Obviously you accuse me of doing something so wrong as to threaten to shoot me down — I think a relatively minor crime such as talking too much cannot be any worse,” Cazaux said, using his best, most urbane, most lighthearted voice. “You sound like a very young and pretty woman, mademoiselle. Please tell me your name. Over.” There was no response — Cazaux did not expect one. He pulled back another notch of power and lowered five degrees of flaps— not enough to be noticed by the fighter, but enough so he could safely slow down another ten to twenty knots. As he fed in some elevator trim to maintain altitude at the slower airspeed, he said cross-cockpit, “Let’s see how slow the F-16 fighter can fly, shall we?”
“I got ’em,” he heard Krull say behind him. The “goggles” were actually older NVG-3 model monocular night- vision scopes, bulky and heavy, with a separate battery pack and a head mounting harness kit.
“Plug them in, search out the windows for the fighter on our right wing,” Cazaux said. “Tell me the approximate angle of attack of the fighter.”
“The what?”
“Tell me how high the fighter’s nose is from the horizon, and whether she has deployed flaps — the control surfaces on the front and back edges of the wings. Do it.”
It took a long time for Krull to figure out how to use the night-vision goggles and to study the F-16 fighter beside them. In that time, Cazaux had slowed the LET down to below 160 knots and had fed in ten degrees of flaps. They were also much closer to the central part of the Sacramento Valley, with the city lights of central California’s megalopolis stretching from Modesto to the south all the way up to Marysville to the north, and the bright glow of San Francisco to the west, visible to them. In a few minutes they would be flying over the Route 99 corridor, a two-hundred- mile-long string of cities and towns with over two million residents. Cazaux felt safe from attack by the Air Force fighter now — they would probably kill hundreds of persons on the ground if they were shot down.
“You still have not told me your name, mademoiselle, ” Cazaux said on the radio. “You know we shall never meet, so indulge me this simple pleasure.”
“Stay off the frequency,” the female Air Force pilot replied angrily. The terrorist smiled — he could easily hear the tension in the woman’s voice. At only one hundred and sixty knots, the F-16 must be getting extremely difficult to control.
“I can’t tell shit, man,” Krull said as he came back into the cockpit and knelt beside the pilots’ seats. “I can see the tail thingamabobs movin’ like crazy.”
“The horizontal tail surfaces.”
“What-the-fuck-ever. I think I see the front part of the wings curled downwards a bit. I can’t see nothin’ else.” “What about the landing gear? Did you see the wheels down?”
“Oh, yeah, man, I saw them. They was down.”
“Good.” Cazaux didn’t know much about the F-16 Fighting Falcon, but he did know that they must be close to its approach speed. At the very least, the F-16 pilots would have their hands full trying to keep up with the slow-flying L-600—and if he was lucky, they wouldn’t be able to keep up, and they’d be forced to break off the intercept or turn it over to someone else. Either way might provide an opportunity to escape.
“Lead, go ahead and accelerate out,” Vincenti radioed to McKenzie on the command channel. He was one thousand feet above the LET L-600 cargo plane, in a tight orbit over Cazaux and McKenzie. Since he put his landing gear down, Cazaux’s airspeed had bled off to the point where he could no longer safely shadow the target, so he had to orbit. Soon, McKenzie would have no choice but to orbit as well — the sooner she transitioned to an orbit, the better. “I’ve got a lock on him. Transition to your racetrack.”
McKenzie wasn’t listening.
With her landing gear down, her leading-edge and trail- ing-edge flaps extended, and the flight control system in takeoff/land, the angle-of-attack indexers were beginning to hit the stops, and the low-speed warning tone would intermittently sound, which meant she had to take her hand off the throttle to silence the horn. Flying at such low airspeeds was common for landing, but she wasn’t accustomed to doing it in level flight, at night, flying close to a strange aircraft that had already tried to turn into her. But she didn’t want to break off the intercept — Henri Cazaux wasn’t going to get the satisfaction of watching her fly away.
“Lead, you copy?” Vincenti radioed to her again. “Clean up and I’ll take over. Transition to radar pursuit.”
“I got it, Al,” she radioed back. But she didn’t have it, and couldn’t keep it, and she knew it. When pursuing a slow-speed target like this, the normal procedure was to begin a racetrack pattern around the target, keeping the speed up in safe limits. A racetrack was dangerous at night, since radar contact could not be maintained on the wingman while in the racetrack, and Vincenti had no night-vision goggles.
But she had no choice. The low-speed warning tone came on for the seventh time. The target had slowed down below 150 knots, and there was no way McKenzie could hold that speed in an F-16. “Correction. Lead’s entering the racetrack. Two, you have the intercept. Break. SIERRA PETE, this is Foxtrot Romeo flight, the target has decelerated — we are transitioning to radar pursuit.”
“Two’s in,” Vincenti replied. McKenzie smoothly advanced the throttle to military power, raised the landing gear before passing 80 percent power, and began a right turn away from the LET L-600.
“The fighter’s leavin’!” Jones crowed. “Landin’ gear’s up… it’s turnin’ away!”
“They won’t be leaving, only setting up an orbit over us so they can keep us in sight and keep their airspeed up,” Cazaux said. “But they’ll give us some breathing room now, and the lower airspeed gives us some more time.”
“To do what, man?” Jones asked. “We still got two jets on our tail, and sure as shit they’re callin’ their buddies to help out. With the gear hangin’, we’ll be runnin’ on fumes in an hour.”
“I know all that, Mr. Krull,” Cazaux said in exasperation. “Shut up and let me think.”
He didn’t have much time to think, because soon the line of lights along the Route 99 corridor reached its largest expanse at the capital city of Sacramento. There were four major airports around Sacramento, all surrounded by housing subdivisions, offices, and light-industrial facilities; Mather Jetport was the largest airport east of the city. Already the rotating beacon and runway lights were visible— they were less than thirty miles out, about fifteen minutes from touchdown. Their flight path was taking them north- westbound toward Highway 50, a busy freeway linking Sacramento with the Sierra Nevada foothills; once reaching that freeway, a turn to the west would put them on a five- mile final approach to Mather Jetport. The lights of the sprawling city were breathtaking, but Cazaux hardly noticed them — all he saw was his plane surrounded by federal agents, a shootout, an explosion, a fireball…