He had just begun to clean up the kitchen when he heard her start the bath water, waited until she was comfortably soaking and carried a cup of coffee in to her. He sat on the commode, talking about the Maypole and thinking how she was built for childbearing.
“I love all this hot water,” she said, “it makes a bath so much more enjoyable when you don’t feel guilty about using it all.” They talked about the differences between Suffolk and Phoenix, Arizona, Jack’s home.
Later, dressed and having a second cup of coffee, they kept the conversation light, but Jack knew he wanted to see her again. Or did he?… She was a woman, all right, and had normal womanly nesting instincts, he assumed. He was a flyboy, married to a warbird.
As though she were reading his thoughts, she put down her cup, found her bag, kissed him lightly on the lips and went out the door without a word.
No demands, no good-byes. A considerable woman, no question. He wondered if he was man enough for her.
The crews received their first surprise as they straggled into the base theater. Sharp-looking security police carefully checked the security clearance of each pilot and wizzo before they entered the auditorium. Most of them found seats in the rear with their squadron mates, but Mike Fairly dragged a reluctant Jack and Thunder to seats in the very front.
Bull Morgan stepped to his podium and shouted, “Room, ten-hut!”
The doors at the rear slammed shut and Colonel Waters quick-stepped down the aisle, stood to the side of the other podium.
“Seats, gentlemen. This is the mission briefing for your first large-scale raid,” the wing commander announced as the lights dimmed and a map of the North Sea and southern Holland was projected onto the screen. Twenty-four Phantoms from each squadron would mount a two-pronged attack on the Dutch airfield of Woensdrecht. The crews gasped as the large-scale map of the base flashed onto the screen. Twelve aircraft from the first cell would run in from the north to attack the base, be off the target within two minutes and exit to the south. The second twelve aircraft would attack from the south thirty seconds later and exit to the north. “The first cell will attack the base from low-level simulating high-drag Mark-82s,” Waters went on. “The second cell will ingress at low level and pop onto their targets; you choose the simulated ordnance. Gentlemen, it’s going to be hairy when you find yourself with twenty-three other birds in the same piece of sky and half of them going in the opposite direction.”
The room was silent. The memory of how the wing had stumbled across the Stamford Military Training Area, barely able to find the target while Rapiers hosed them down, was still fresh. Finally a voice came from the rear: “Colonel, we can’t do that—”
“You will,” Waters cut him off, “but not right away. This is the graduation exercise of your first phase of training. Major Morgan will run through different tactics and techniques you can use. But each squadron will have to work up its own training program and fly this attack before it can move on to the next training phase. I expect the first squadron to be ready to fly it within two weeks.”
Morgan called the room to attention and Waters walked out, leaving over two hundred very worried pilots and wizzos in his wake.
“I would suggest,” Morgan boomed at the crews, “that you get your bodies down front, listen up and take notes. You are going to get your asses in the proverbial crack if you don’t do this one right.”
Jack twisted in his seat, all ears to hear what Morgan had to say and confident his squadron would be the first to attack the Dutch base.
Racer Two-One came off the range at Holbeach and headed home, looking for his wingman. He knew that Racer Two-Two should be coming up on his deep five o’clock for a rejoin but he couldn’t see him. The lead uttered an obscenity. The mission had been perfect until he had lost his wingy after their last pass on the range.
“Racer Two-Two,” he called over the radio, “lead is orbiting south of East Sturnham. Join up for recovery to home plate.”
An affirmative answer told him that his wingman was headed for him. Finally his backseater confirmed that he had Two-Two in sight at their deep seven o’clock position. The lead started an easy righthand turn to allow his wingman to close and join up on his left.
Who could have predicted what happened? It was, after all, an easy maneuver that the wingman had performed who knew how many times in the past. Nothing was mechanically wrong with the birds. But as the lead turned between the twin villages of East Sturnham and Little Sturnham, Racer Two-Two smashed into the belly of his flight leader, instantly killing both crewmembers in Two-Two as the force of the impact crushed the canopies down onto them.
The engineers at McDonnell Douglas had designed the Phantom to withstand the ravages of combat, repeated hard landings on the decks of aircraft carriers and sustained high-G maneuvers. The Phantom was a hulking sixteen-ton monster that deserved its monicker Big Ugly. Big Ugly did not die easily. The engineers had done their work well. The pilot in Racer Two-One fought for control of his damaged bird as it sent him repeated signals that it could not stay in the air much longer.
He yelled at his backseater to eject alone, leaving him in the aircraft for a later ejection. His wizzo turned the valve selecting his seat for a single ejection and pulled the handle, separating cleanly from the aircraft at thirty-five hundred feet. The F-4 wanted to roll right and pitch down into the ground as the pilot turned it toward an open field, away from the village of Little Sturnham. With both hands on the stick the pilot managed to guide the Phantom away from the village before it pitched over into its final dive. The pilot reached for the ejection handle between his legs and pulled, ejecting from the bird as it flopped on its back, aiming him directly toward the ground.
A farmer watched the pilot hit the ground upside down, still strapped into his seat as the Phantom crashed only fifty yards behind the school. For a moment he could not move, horrified by the sight. Then he jumped off his tractor and ran toward the school, forgetting that he could drive there more quickly. He reached the yard along with the wizzo as the wreckage burst into fire. Both men ran into the school building, afraid of what they would find inside. To their relief no one was hurt and the three teachers were directing their small charges out the front door. The wizzo ran through the classrooms checking for stragglers. Outside, he scanned the playyard, grateful to find it empty. The wail of sirens sounded in the distance.
RAF Stonewood learned of the crash through the civilian disaster net and immediately dispatched crash trucks and twelve security policemen to Little Sturnham. They drove through the village toward East Sturnham and to the site of the second crash, where they found the wreckage of the F-4 in a burning dairy barn full of bellowing cows. An eighteen-year-old security policeman ran into the barn in a futile attempt to rescue the animals. After bringing out four burning cows he watched a crash truck turn a fire hose on the animals. He drew his revolver and walked up to each cow and put a bullet in its head. The owner of the herd recognized the grief in the boy. “Thank you, lad. I couldn’a done it.”
Sara watched her husband fight his inner demon, marking up a temporary win. Without words she had cleared the dinner table while Waters tried once again to write three terrible letters to next of kin. Sara waited, knowing at some point he would need to talk. Finally he did.
“My God, we’ve lost three aircraft under my command. For Cunningham that’s three too many. For me too. I don’t give a damn about the airframes; I just want the crews to get out… I don’t know, maybe I’m pushing them too hard, demanding too much of them after Morris. But damn it, we’re close to getting the wing on track. And with a little more time — but we’re running out of time. Bill Carroll is keeping us up to date on the situation in the Gulf. He’s translating Arabic and Iranian newspapers, listening to their news broadcasts on a shortwave radio and tying it together with the usual Intelligence summaries we get from the Air Force. What he’s telling us is scary. The place is unstable as hell, as there’s a major buildup of supplies going on in southern Iran.”