This man of mystery, this Russian pilot about whose life and thoughts I know so little, becomes in my mind a man not unlike myself, who is flying an airplane fitted with rockets and bombs and machine guns not because he loves destruction but because he loves his airplane, and the job of flying a capable, spirited airplane in any Air Force cannot be divorced from the job of killing when there is a war to be fought.
I am growing to like this probable pilot of the enemy, the more so because he is an unknown and forbidden man, with no one to bear witness of the good in him, and so many at hand to condemn his evils.
If war is declared here in Europe, I will never know the truth of the man who mounts the cockpit of a red-starred airplane. If war is declared, we are unleashed against each other, like starved wolves, to fight. A friend of mine, a true proven friend, neither imagined nor conjured out of possibilities, will fall to the guns of a Russian pilot. Somewhere an American will die under his bombs. In that instant I will be swallowed up in one of the thousand evils of war; I will have lost the host of unmet friends who are the Russian pilots. I will rejoice in their death, take pride in the destruction of their beautiful airplanes under my own rockets and my own guns. If I succumb to hate, I will myself become certainly and unavoidably a lesser man. In my pride I will be less worthy of pride. I will kill the enemy, and in so doing will bring my own death upon me. And I am sad.
But this night no war has been declared. It seems, in the quiet days, almost as if our nations might learn to live with each other, and this night the eastern pilot of my imagining, more real than the specter he would become in wartime, is flying his own solitary airplane into his own capricious weather.
My gloves are at work again, leveling the airplane at 33,000 feet. Throttle comes back under the left glove until the engine tachometer shows 94 percent rpm. The thumb of the right glove touches the trim button on the control stick once and again, quickly, forward. The eyes flick from instrument to instrument, and all is in order. Fuel flow is 2,500 pounds per hour. Mach needle is resting over .8, which means that my true airspeed is settling at 465 knots. The thin luminous needle of the radiocompass, over its many-numbered dial, pivots suddenly as the Abbeville radiobeacon passes beneath my airplane, under the black cloud. Eyes make a quick check of transmitter frequency, voice is ready with a position report to air traffic control, left thumb is down on the microphone button at 2200 hours, and the audience behind the eyes sees the first faint flash of lightning in the high opaque darkness ahead.
CHAPTER TWO
“France Control, Air Force Jet Two Niner Four Zero Five, Abbeville.” Empty static for a moment in the soft earphones, and I see, very clearly, a man in a large square room cluttered with teletypes and speakers and frequency dials and round grey radar screens. At an upholstered swivel chair, the man leans forward to his microphone, setting aside a glass of red wine.
“Four Zero Five, France Control, go ahead.” The accent in his English is barely noticeable. That is rare. He reaches for a pencil, from a jar bristling with pencils.
The microphone button is down again under my left thumb, and I hear again the sidetone, just as the man on the ground is hearing it. The engine in the sidetone is a quiet and businesslike roar, a waterfall of purposeful sound that is a background for my message. My words are filtered through the tubed body of the transmitter to become impersonal and faraway, the voice of someone I know only as a casual acquaintance. “France Control, Zero Five is over Alpha Bravo on the hour, flight level three three zero assigned instrument flight rules, estimating Lima Charlie at zero niner, Spangdahlem.” Good old France. The only country in Europe where you never say the name of a reporting point, but only its initials, with a little air of mystery as you do. The familiar pattern of the position report is rhythmic and poetic; it is a pattern of pure efficiency that is beautiful to speak. There are thousands of position reports spoken and heard every hour across the earth; they are as basic a part of instrument flying as the calls for landing information are a basic part of fair-weather flight. Position reports are part of a way of life.
“Roger, Zero Five, on your position. Report Lima Charlie.” The pencil stops, the whine is lifted.
With his last word, the man at France Control has ceased to exist. I am left, alone again with the night and the stars and the sounds of my airplane.
In every other fighter airplane, cruise is a time of quiet and of smooth unvarying sound. The pilot hushes along on his tamed fall of sound and knows that all is well with his engine and his airplane. But not with this airplane, not with my F-84F. My airplane is a clown. Its engine sounds more like a poorly-tuned, poorly-muffled V-8 than a smoothly efficient dynamo spinning on pressure-oiled bearings. I was warned when I began to fly the Thunderstreak that if the engine ever stopped vibrating I would be in trouble. It is true. Strange sounds come from nowhere, linger for a while in the body of the airplane, then die away.
Now, behind my left shoulder, a low whine begins. Intrigued by the new tone that my harlequin airplane has discovered, I listen attentively. The whine rises higher and higher, as if a tiny turbine was accelerating to tremendous speed. My left glove inches the throttle back an inch and the whine calms a fraction; throttle forward and it regains its spinning song. In another airplane the whine would be cause for serious and concerned interest; in my airplane it is cause for a slight smile under the green rubber oxygen mask. I had once thought that I had heard all the noises that it was possible for this airplane to make. After a moment, the whine dies away by itself.
Thud. There is the smallest tremor in the throttle, and a sound as if a hard snowball had hit the side of the fuselage. In an F-100 or an F-104, in the new airplanes, the thud would bring a sudden stiffening of pilot and a quick re-check of the engine instruments. In another airplane the thud would likely mean that the engine has thrown a turbine blade, and that a host of unpleasant consequences are to follow. In my ’84 though, a thud is just one more sound in the kaleidoscope of sounds that the airplane offers to its pilot, another evidence of an unconforming personality hidden in the metal.
My airplane has a great variety of individual quirks; so many that before we arrived in France it was necessary to arrange a little meeting with the control tower operators, to tell them about the airplane. The boom of the engine start could send the uninitiated scrambling for the fire alarm. When the engine is idling on the ground, turning a modest 46 percent of her available rpm, she hums. She hums not quietly to herself, but an amplified, penetrating, resonant distracting “MMMM” that makes the crew chiefs point painfully to their ears, reminding pilots to advance the power, to increase the rpm past the point of resonance. It is a very precise and human hum she makes, and there is no doubt over all the airbase that an F-84F is preparing to fly. Heard from a comfortable distance, the airplane is setting the note for the song of her higher thunder. Later, in the sky, there is usually no trace of her resonance, though the cockpit is filled with the other sounds of her engine.