“I will.”
He came over and stood right behind her. “This is supposed to be a little day jaunt down to Petrovsk, roll in and make a couple of runs with live ordnance, then back to the barn. But it may not go like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“The other night we were sitting in a park when people started shooting. Some people here and there would probably like to see Jake Grafton dead. Somebody wants those missiles pretty badly. Keep your head on a swivel. Watch your six. If anybody looks cross-eyed, blow ’em out of the sky.”
Rita got her hair the way she wanted it and inserted bobby pins.
“Grafton’s been shot at by experts,” he told her. “Anybody that straps him on is in big trouble. Just stick to him like glue. Stay with him. No matter what, fly your own airplane.”
“I will, Toad.”
She finished with her hair and turned around to face him. He put his hands on her shoulders. “I want you back in one piece.”
“I know, lover.”
“We’re in a helluva fix when we send pregnant women to fight our battles.”
“Shut up and kiss me.”
Jake took Spiro Dalworth along because he spoke Russian. Unfortunately he knew next to nothing about aviation or airplanes or weapons, so the terms didn’t translate very well. Yet somehow Jake and Rita found out what they had to know. They took turns sitting in the cockpit of an Su-25 asking questions. Dalworth translated and a Russian pilot supplied the answers.
The pilot was young, a lieutenant. He was in culture shock. “Who flies?” he asked Dalworth.
Spiro pointed to Jake and Rita.
“The woman?”
“Yes, she will fly.”
“A woman? She will fly?”
“Yes.”
When Rita asked a question, the answer was short, curt. When Jake asked one Dalworth had trouble finding a pause to translate amid the Russian’s verbal flood. Rita saw the problem and addressed her comments to Jake, who then asked the questions. The process seemed to work better that way.
The olive-drab airplane with a red star on the tail seemed an excellent piece of military equipment. With two internal engines generating over eleven thousand pounds of thrust each, ten external weapons pylons under a wing designed to haul a big load of ordnance, an adequate fuel supply, and a twin-barrel 30mm cannon mounted internally, the airplane seemed just what the doctor ordered for ground attack. The avionics were not state-of-the-art, however. The plane lacked a radar and had no computer to assist the pilot, who had to do his own navigation with a minimum of electronic help. Jake and Rita would have to find the target with their Mark I, Mod Zero eyeballs and attack it with dumb weapons. The plane contained a laser ranger and could deliver laser-guided weapons, but it lacked a laser designator. The bombsight was strictly mechanical.
The cockpit and pilot chores were straightforward enough, yet the switches and gauges were scattered throughout the cockpit with apparently no forethought given to ease of operation or minimizing the pilot’s workload.
Visibility from the cockpit wasn’t great either. Although the pilot sat well forward of the wing, the view aft was nonexistent and the view downward was restricted by the sides of the airplane.
The electronic warfare (EW) panel was simple and passive. Lights illuminated when the plane was painted by radars on certain bandwidths, but after receiving that quiet warning the pilot was on his own.
“It’s no A-6 or F/A-18,” Rita remarked.
“More like an A-7,” Jake muttered.
The only officer they met was the lieutenant who had led them to the hangar for their briefing. The CO of the base and the CO of the air wing were conspicuously absent. They were cooperating on orders from Moscow, but that was all.
The officers’ quarters were a barracks. Rita tossed her stuff on a bunk and stared back at the Russian pilots, who were whispering among themselves.
They were offered food. Jake declined for everyone — he didn’t want to risk a case of the trots. Hunger was preferable.
After Jake had used his satellite com gear for another long talk with General Land in Washington, he sat on a bottom bunk with Rita and examined the charts they had brought from Moscow. With only these charts they had to find the Petrovsk base, then find their way back here. Most of the Russian nav aids were inoperable and the Su-25 might not reliably receive the ones that were transmitting.
There was a minor flurry in the bathroom when Spiro insisted all the Russians depart so that Rita could use it, but the lights went out without fanfare after Rita disappointed a little knot of onlookers by crawling under her blanket fully dressed.
Jake Grafton lay under his blanket staring into the darkness, tired but not sleepy. The hangar where the missiles and warheads were housed was priority number one tomorrow morning. Then, if there were any bombs or cannon shells left, they would attack the clean room with its warhead parts stacked everywhere. And they had to do it on the first flight. There was no way they could ask Yeltsin to let them fly another mission, not with the outstanding cooperation and friendly attitude these uniformed folks here had displayed.
And then there was the problem of the missiles in Iraq. Just how long did mankind have before Saddam Hussein decided his new arsenal was operational? Had the dictator reached that point already? How could the Americans plan an airborne assault into Iraq that minimized the hundreds of possible things that could go wrong and yet gave them a reasonable chance of grabbing or destroying the weapons before the Iraqi military massively retaliated? Were the odds good enough to order people into action, or should they be asked to volunteer? They would volunteer to a man, Jake was convinced, but he wanted no part of asking anyone to commit suicide. Nor did he plan on doing it himself.
What was Herb Tenney up to these days? Did the CIA tell him of this bombing mission? What could he do about it? Why would he do anything? More to the point, what could Yakolev and his cohorts do, assuming they were so inclined?
Dozens of questions, no answers. But first things first. The mission tomorrow — Jake knew how tough it would be. Using contact navigation to get to Petrovsk would be tough enough. Flying there in a type of aircraft he had never flown before was a helluva challenge. The task would be huge even if he were current on jet aircraft, which he wasn’t. How long had it been since he had flown a tactical aircraft? Three years? No, four. Actually four years and three months.
And Rita had never been in combat. Oh, this wasn’t supposed to be combat, but what if someone started shooting? How would Rita handle it?
Maybe he should have said something to her.
What? Knowing Rita Moravia, anything he could come up with would wound her pride. Oh, she wouldn’t let on, would say yessir and nosir with the utmost respect, but…
So what could go wrong tomorrow?
Only a couple million things. He began to list them, to sort through the possibilities and try to decide now what he would do if and when he was faced with real problems.
He was still mulling contingencies an hour later when he finally drifted into a troubled sleep filled with blood and disaster.
He was preflighting the ejection seat and removing the safety pins when he realized that one pin was already out. This one here, attached to the others with this red ribbon, that went where? He looked. Must be somewhere here on the side of the seat, to safety the drogue extraction initiator mechanism.
He found the place. A steel pin protruded from the hole. He tried to pull it out with his fingers.
Nope. It was in there to stay.
Someone hammered this steel rod into that hole. Oh, the ejection seat would still fire, but the drogue chute would not deploy and so the main chute would stay in its pack as he sat in the seat waiting, all the way to the ground.