Bruce clicked his mike. “Escort One heading up to twenty thousand.” He flipped over to intercom. “Where are we, Foggy?”
“One mile from the runway—”
POP POP POP POP POP POP POP.…
A staccato of bursts exploded over Bruce’s headphones. Tempered Plexiglas from the heads-up display blew up, then sagged back in crushed plastic. Screams came over the intercom.
“Foggy!”
“I can’t get it off — oh God, it doesn’t come off!”
Bruce scanned the instruments; nothing was working. Needle dials were pegged, and none of the digital instruments was on. He tried to pull back on the stick; the F-15E moved sluggishly — he still had hydraulics. Wind seemed to roar in the back, as if a hole had been punched over Charlie’s part of the cockpit. Still the screaming continued.
“Charlie, are you okay?”
The screams broke to spastic sobs. “Oh, God, Bruce — it hurts! I can’t see! I can’t get it off!”
“What? Can’t get what off?”
“Oh, God! The helmet! Help me … do something … I can’t stand it.” Bruce could imagine him clawing at the helmet, trying to get it off.
What had happened? Had they been hit by a missile — antiaircraft fire? Was Charlie’s helmet punctured?
“Do something, Bruce — I can’t last much longer!”
Bruce flipped to “Guard,” the emergency frequency. “Mayday, mayday! This is Escort One, I have an emergency. Instruments out … I’m going to need some help.”
Nothing came over the radio, not even static. Bruce flipped through the frequencies. “Mayday, mayday! Can anyone hear me?” Still nothing.
Bruce pulled back on the stick to gain altitude. His instruments were out. He didn’t know how high he was, where he was going, or how much fuel he had.
“Please, God, help me!” Charlie’s voice broke into a crying fit.
Bruce felt short of breath. For the first time in his life, he was afraid he was going to die.
“Holy Mother Mary,” muttered Staff Sergeant Whiltree. “Why me? And why now?” She quickly cleared her radar screen and initialized the search sequence. There it was again.
She keyed her microphone and got a direct line to her supervisor, Chief Master Sergeant Figarno. “Chief, I’ve lost Air Force Two.” She tried to keep her voice steady, but the others seated around her looked up sharply.
“What?” He appeared at her side, wire from headphones trailing behind him. Ramrod-straight, with jet-black hair and penetrating eyes, Figarno was one of the youngest Chief Master Sergeants in the Air Force.
Whiltree pointed at the blinking numbers that were diverging away from the main flight path. “Air Force Two is going down and I can’t get them to respond.”
“What about the escort?”
“I waved Escort One off—hey, there it is again!” Whiltree and Figarno watched in amazement as the screen blinked. Not once, but seven or eight times in a row. When the blinking had stopped, Escort One was also veering from its designated path. Whiltree immediately started calling over the radio. “Escort One, you are too low and deviating from flight path. Come in, Escort One. Do you copy?”
They waited for a moment, but nothing came over the airways. Figarno leaned into the screen. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” Whiltree wet her lips. “They won’t answer.”
“What do you mean they won’t answer?”
“You heard me — Air Force Two and Escort One aren’t transmitting!”
Figarno’s voice stayed cool. “But is it because of our equipment or theirs? When your screen blinked, did that mean that our gear was knocked out of commission, or theirs?”
“Let me try something.” She typed rapidly on the keyboard next to the screen. The screen reconfigured and showed a test echo. Whiltree pointed at the blip. “That’s a return signal from Wallace Air Station. It’s not our gear that’s broken.” She switched the screen back to Air Force Two and Escort One.
Figarno straightened. “All right, keep trying to raise them.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” Whiltree turned back to the screen and spoke into her microphone.
Chief Master Sergeant Figarno strode to a red telephone sitting on a table in the center of the room. He picked up the phone, “This is Figarno. Threatcon Delta Emergency — launch rescue helicopters and patch me into Thirteenth Air Force.”
The jumbo jet flew beneath the low cloud cover, away from Clark. If Emil had not been watching for the plane he would not have noticed it.
It appeared to be making a normal approach to a runway, descending at a slow rate with its nose elevated slightly higher than its tail. But the jumbo jet was headed toward no runway; instead, it seemed to be aiming for the old Del Playo rice field. And, even more curiously, the plane’s landing gear was not extended.
Emil had sat just off-base at the end of the Clark runway many times, drinking San Miguel and watching the lumbering jets scream overhead in a landing. He would laugh with his friends, and they all hoped to someday witness a crash. What a sight that would be! But the planes always seemed to land, and all Emil had to show for his outing would be a ringing in his ears.
But today … this jumbo jet kept heading to the ground, unwavering in its determination to land in the rice paddy. Emil flicked on the radio.
“The Del Playo rice paddy — a jumbo jet is about to crash.”
Emil heard excited voices in the background. “Are you sure? The Del Playo fields?”
“Of course. But I do not think the plane is going to make it.” Emil dropped the radio to his side. Like a behemoth, the jumbo jet continued to drop in altitude. It kept a constant rate of descent.
Still a good hundred feet in the air, it overflew the end of the rice paddies. The plane kept coming down, lower and lower, until the bottom of the craft just scraped the top of the jungle.
Seconds later, the plane’s wings ripped from the body; they tumbled out, spewing a liquid fire from its ends and skipping across the tree tops. The jet’s fuselage started to flip over, but it skidded in the trees and made a gash a quarter of a mile long. The crash seemed to take forever, and Emil reveled in it.
When the long fuselage finally stopped moving, no flames came from the wreckage. The sound of the crash reverberated over the countryside, reaching Emil a half minute after the plane first hit the tree tops. The wings exploded and burned, two hundred yards on either side of the plane.
Emil spoke into the radio. “The plane has stopped, north of the fields.”
But no answer came back.
Emil stowed the radio and started his motorcycle. He felt elated. After all these years he had finally witnessed a crash. Best of all, he was going to get paid for doing it.
The alert siren warbled an ear-splitting shriek. There was no time to think — only react.
Captains Bob Gould and Richard Head threw down their cards and ran for the doors, knocking over the table.
Gould managed to shout, “This for real?”
Head puffed out, “I don’t want to find out,” as he followed right on Gould’s heels.
The two ran fifty yards through the rain, across the slick asphalt helicopter pad to their MH-60 Black Hawk. The modified attack helicopter looked menacing as they approached, a crouching gargoyle ready to devour anyone who came near.
Gould swung into the helicopter just as a crew of enlisted men reached the auxiliary power units. Head waved a finger quickly around his head, indicating that the men should crank up the APUs. Seconds later, the engine caught and spat out thick smoke.