“Coming up on the first turn point,” Jack intoned. “We’ll be doing communications-out turns. By the way, first time we’ve ever done them. Colonel Waters showed us how.”
Just what he didn’t need to hear, Blevins thought.
The lead Phantom turned hard left into them while Jack only turned sixty degrees to the left. For a split second Blevins was absolutely sure they were going to collide, until the lead aircraft slid behind them. Jack then wrenched his bird further to the left, completing the turn and banging Blevins’ head against the canopy. They were straight and level again, going in another direction, still two thousand feet apart.
“Goddamn,” Blevins muttered, forgetting that his intercom was hot.
“You okay?” Jack asked, wondering if the colonel would survive the flight if a few four-G maneuvers were going to upset him.
“Yeah, no problem.”
After three more short legs, each ending in a hard turn, Fairly made their first radio transmission since takeoff. “Mirow Range, Poppa Two-One, flight of two, five minutes out.”
“Roger, Poppa Two-One, you are cleared onto the range, first attack hot. Altimeter setting, two-niner-niner-eight. Report IP.”
“Roger, Mirow, two-niner-niner-eight,” Lead repeated the altimeter setting, and both pilots dialed the number into the Kollsman window of their altimeters.
“Poppa Two-Two, arm ’em up.”
With the last command from his lead, Jack set the series of switches that would allow him to pickle off practice bombs. He continued his commentary for Blevins. “This is the first time we’ve flown a low-level to the range and then dropped a bomb on the first pass out of a pop maneuver. We’ve done low levels and pops before, but like I said, Colonel Waters showed us how to put them all together. I can’t believe how simple comm-out turns are. It’s a great mission profile.”
Blevins gritted his teeth.
At the initial point onto the range Fairly keyed his radio again. “Poppa Flight, IP now.”
Again the planes jerked onto a new heading, but now Jack descended to one hundred feet, the ground rush starting, the noise scary.
“You’re cleared in hot,” the range controller acknowledged, barely audible over the noise.
At their altitude Blevins could not see the range, but he did notice the two F-4s were moving further apart, both on different headings. Then the nose of Fairly’s plane came up as he pulled into a sharp climb.
Fifteen seconds later Jack pulled his Phantom up and at sixteen hundred feet rolled the F-4 onto its back and pulled the nose toward the ground. The range filled the forward windscreen, and the noise increased with their airspeed climb to 450 knots as they rolled out and dove toward the range. Blevins could see the wisps of marking smoke blowing away from where lead’s small bomb had impacted. Then they were off, pulling four Gs as they pointed skyward. Again Jack rolled the F-4 and pulled toward the ground, then rolled out and leveled off at one hundred feet, following Poppa Two-One in a racecourse pattern around the range.
Now the range controller called out the scores for their first bombs. “Two-One, eighty feet at seven o’clock. Two-Two, bull.”
Five more times they repeated the maneuver, pulling up, rolling and diving toward the ground. Their escape maneuver was the same, and not once did their airspeed drop below 420 knots. Jack’s scores for the first two bombs were better than Fairly’s.
“Did you copy the scores down?” Jack asked after their last pass.
“Didn’t have time,” Blevins said.
Right, Jack thought. You get the message.
They came off the range, climbing lazily to twelve thousand feet, and headed for the base. Blevins was drenched with sweat in spite of the cool blast of air. Unexpectedly he felt nauseous and began gagging.
“You okay?” The pilot’s query was greeted by retching sounds and heavy breathing. Jack keyed his radio transmit button, sending the sounds on the intercom out to the world.
Fifty-five minutes after takeoff the two F-4s made a near-perfect formation landing, with one sick colonel in the pit of number two still trying with diminishing success to keep his cookies down.
Sara had gone with Waters and Mort Pullman to the hangar where the crash-recovery team had collected and spread out the parts of the Flogger retrieved from the crash site. After poking through the wreckage and taking a few pictures for the report, Waters said, “Sara, you don’t have to do this. We’re going to the morgue and talk to the Mortuary Affairs Officer. The Egyptians are picking up the remains of the Libyan pilot today. The Libyans are asking that the body and its personal effects be returned immediately, and the Egyptians are going along with their request.”
“I’d like to stick with you,” Sara said. What else could she say?
The base veterinarian, who doubled as the Mortuary Affairs Officer, met them at the door to the small building behind the hospital. “You’re just in time,” he told them. “An Egyptian army officer arrived to pick up the body about five minutes ago.” The vet introduced them to Captain Khalid Shakir, who was poking through a cardboard box holding the pilot’s personal effects. Most of the items were fragmented and charred beyond recognition. Shakir held up a large piece of a uniform and pointed out the Libyan insignia on the shoulder. He shrugged and held up part of a helmet, then threw all the pieces back into the box and closed it. “May I see the body? This business is sickening.” He spoke with an English accent.
The vet pulled open a small door in the refrigerated cabinet that could hold six bodies and rolled out the long drawer. Sara gasped when she saw the three-foot lump in the middle of the green rubber body-bag.
“Yes, I did not expect much,” Shakir said. “I understand I must sign some paperwork.”
The vet introduced a thin stack of papers and handed them over to Shakir. The captain dashed his signature across the top sheet and ripped it off, handing it to the vet, snapped his fingers and two sergeants collected the box and body-bag and they all left.
Sara picked up a copy of the crash report and thumbed through it, hesitating when she reached the death certificate. “Cause of death: blunt massive trauma followed by immediate dismemberment and incineration.” She paused. “Does that mean he was still alive when… ”
Waters shrugged, not telling her the pilot was probably still conscious when his aircraft hit the ground.
Waters was beginning to accept that Blevins was at least an excellent staff officer. His analysis of the crash site was right on. He had torn apart the Command Post’s response to the scramble on Grain King, finding nothing wrong and praising them in some specifics. And he admitted things happened very fast during a flight. That, Waters thought, was a good sign. They could maybe forget about a critique that said aircrews weren’t “evaluating the situation.”
As Blevins gathered up his papers to return to his own office, Waters asked if he’d seen Sara that morning.
Blevins fairly licked his chops. “I haven’t seen her, but you might check with Lieutenant Locke.” Actually Blevins had only seen Sara with Locke when they returned from the marketplace and knew she had gone back to her own room in the VOQ early in the evening. Well, the price of playing poker with Eugene Blevins had gone up. He tried not to smile as he walked out of Waters’ office.
Taking the bait, Waters stood there, feeling hurt and angry and foolish. He’d been a presumptuous middle-aged jerk. He didn’t have any claim on Sara. Hell, he thought, one look at those two together… what did he expect…? He jammed a new tape into the small cassette recorder he always carried, hoping the Prelude from Verdi’s La Traviata would help. It didn’t.
Chief Pullman had seen Blevins leave Waters’ office with a shit-eating grin and didn’t like it. Pullman had heard about the colonel’s flight at the NCO Club, even heard the control tower recording of the colonel being sick. Now why would a humiliated man be smiling? Time to put out some feelers.