“Lay down,” Landis ordered. “You may be hurt, are likely in a state of shock.” But when he quickly examined the man he found him only bruised, scratched and filthy from being dragged through the grass.
Bull shook his head. “Doc, you went out too. Why don’t you join me and we’ll swap lies till the crash trucks get here.”
The first crash truck on the scene found them lying in the short grass on their back, side by side, laughing like loons.
At the hospital they were just coming out of the lab where a technician had taken the obligatory blood samples for drugs or alcohol when Waters found them.
“What happened?”
Bull stood in the corridor, hands on hips and leaning forward into the colonel. “Maintenance again, Colonel. I’m going to nail their asses—”
“Bull, take it easy,” Waters said. “You’ve been through ejections before. Save what you’ve got for the accident board.” That’s all we need, Waters thought, two accident boards on-base at the same time.
“What do we do now?” Landis said.
“The flying safety officer is around here someplace and will want to talk to us,” Bull told him. “But right now I’m going over to Maintenance and find the flight-controls specialist that worked on the bird last.”
“What the hell happened?” Landis pressed.
“The goddamn stick programmed full-aft when we lifted off; the bird was trying to do a loop. We didn’t have the airspeed or the altitude for that. I used the rudder to roll us into a ninety-degree bank to the left, which put us into a tight left turn away from the village. Except our lift vector was perpendicular to good old gravity and we didn’t have a hell of a lot of airspeed to help us out. That’s when I told you to eject us. And that’s what goddamn happened.”
“But why are you going to Maintenance?”
“The bird was trying to do the same thing yesterday but I broke the stick free. I wrote it up in the maintenance forms and even told them it was a problem with a leaking actuator valve. Airman Siebold didn’t do his job right when he signed it off and I’m just going to explain a few things to him… ”
The doctor trailed after the Bull, trying to talk him out of going to Maintenance. But he went directly to the flight control shop and found the young airman who had repaired the Phantom. To Doc’s surprise, though, Morgan sat the young man down and talked quietly with him, gesturing with his hands and, as he said he would, explaining what had happened. Then he took the nineteen-year-old to a work bench and disassembled an actuator valve like the one that had failed and caused the accident, showing what went wrong. Before he left he gave the airman’s rear a swat and told him to take it easy.
“That’s the way Colonel Waters handled things at Nellis and Bitburg,” Bull said. “Works good with young troops. The kid will feel like a shithead for a few days, but he’ll learn. He better. I stop being Mr. Nice Guy the second time around.”
Waters thumbed through the pages of the London newspaper, ignoring the topless pinup on page three. He was concentrating on the birdwatcher’s photographs that had made the first and second page of the national newspaper under the headline: “Death Crash of Fighter — Farmers Live in Fear.” He threw the paper down. “No one was killed,” he snapped at the paper, then picked up the phone and called Childs.
The English group captain listened to Waters and agreed that the birdwatcher would probably be delighted to meet the crew he had photographed ejecting, hung up and called the president of the Suffolk Birdwatchers Club. He placed a second call to Anglia TV.
Later that afternoon he ushered Brian Philips into Waters’ office. Philips was a tall and gangly man who kept bobbing his head when he talked, reminding Waters of a stooped whooping crane with two cameras hung around its neck. The three men then drove out to the hangar where the pieces of the wreckage were being collected and examined. Bull Morgan and Doc Landis were already waiting for them, and Philips was delighted as he shot roll after roll of film. When Philips seemed satisfied with the pictures he had taken, Waters rummaged through the wreckage until he found the actuator valve he was looking for. He and Philips then squatted on the floor while the wing commander explained how the valve had malfunctioned and how Bull Morgan had used the Phantom’s rudder to guide the dying aircraft to the left away from the village.
After the pictures and a television interview with the birdwatcher, public opinion swung in favor of the wing. A few of the older citizens even went on record that they were glad to have neighbors like the 45th, men who would stay with an aircraft to guide it away from their village. Sir David Childs was a bloody genius. But the next time…
The Maintenance problem lent itself to no PR deal. After investigations were completed, slipshod maintenance was found the primary cause in both crashes. When Waters asked Colonel Leason to come into his office the DM had no illusions why he was there and fully expected Waters to fire him on the spot. He had seen other DMs replaced for much less.
“Tell me,” Waters said, “why Maintenance can’t hack it.”
“Colonel Waters,” Leason began, “I’ve been playing a survival game. Took the easy way out… I mean, Colonel Morris was only interested in flying the exact number of hours headquarters allocated to us each calendar quarter. As long as we kept on schedule and maintained the time line he stayed off our backs. Since he cut back on the number of demanding missions the crews were flying, we got out of the habit of keeping the birds fully tweaked—”
“History, Leason. I asked why Maintenance can’t hack it now. All you’ve done is told me why you were screwing off under Morris.”
“Given a chance, sir, we can do our job.” Given incentive was more like it, Waters thought. “How long will it take you to get the birds back in shape?”
“If we have to fly the time line and the required amount of night sorties, at least six months—”
“I’m thinking six weeks.”
“Impossible—”
“Too bad. There’s a brace of lieutenant colonels in your organization who are about to get a chance to prove you wrong. Am I clear?”
“Are you giving me a second chance?”
“Depends. I don’t give a damn about flying out the hours headquarters has given us. I want productive training sorties for my crews so they have a chance to practice tactics and learn something. They can’t do that with sick birds. Also, they won’t get productive sorties by sky-hooking at night. All the ranges close at dark and there’s not much else they can do at night, so starting tomorrow we’re going on a flying schedule in the day and a fix-’em schedule at night. There will be no flying on weekends for the next month. You’ll have all the birds to work on for twelve hours a day and over the weekends. You’ve got six weeks to have the fleet in top-notch condition or… let’s just say you’ll freeze your ass, or boil it, where you’ll be going for your last tour in this Air Force.”
“Colonel Waters, I don’t know if you’re giving me enough time but I guarantee to kick some ass—”
“Never mind the talk, just do it,” Waters said, and dismissed him. Sundown, Waters thought. I’m turning into a Sundown Cunningham. Well, so be it. When you haven’t got time, fear can work its wonders. He glanced at his watch. He was going to Mildenhall to meet Tom Gomez, his new deputy for Operations.