Jack drew Gillian into his arms. She had it right, no question. She knew… knew him, which excited and even scared him a little…
“What am I going to do with you?” he said, pulling her to him.
“Well, you can start by letting me show you London. You’ve given me part of your world; it’s my turn to show you some of mine.” For starters, she added to herself.
The London that Gillian first showed Jack included an aunt’s elegant home in Mayfair, meeting her friends in a variety of pubs, and the theater. Over breakfast Sunday morning Jack told her that he now wanted to play tourist and see at least one of the standard sights.
Gillian checked the weather, found that it would be cold and sunny… a miracle in London. “That’s it then,” she told him. “Greenwich by river.” They caught the tour boat for Greenwich at Tower Bridge, and Jack saw why the famous observatory should only be seen from the river. The rigging of the clipper ship Cutty Sark dominated his first impression until he saw the expanse of the buildings designed by Christopher Wren.
In bed early Monday morning, Jack reached out for Gillian — she wasn’t there. A sudden hurt, an ache of loneliness hit him before he realized he was panicking, that she had gone no further than the bathroom. When she came back to bed he pretended to be asleep, not wanting to let her know how he felt… still confused — even afraid — about what was happening to him.
The next day when Thunder decided he’d had enough of waiting around for the Ahlhorn mission, delayed by the rotten weather, Jack grabbed at his suggestion that they get a pass and try some skiing in the Alps. Without saying as much, it was an escape from more than the tedium of waiting for the weather to clear…
The cold of the Alps and getting to the hotel in Davos that they’d been booked into made them almost nostalgic for the wet but tolerable English countryside. Never mind, they’d determined to have a time and proceeded to begin with a quick trip to the bar, which was crowded with some especially succulent women, including two who identified themselves only as Jane and Diana. The getting together didn’t take long — everybody knew what everybody was there for, including but not restricted to the slopes.
And the next day, after a run from the top of the Weiss-fluhjoch down the Parsenns-Klosters trail, Jack and Thunder again got together at the bar with the ladies, who this time were conversing in French, with two men, a Frenchman named Paul and another, an Arab, named Reza.
Paul was especially interested to hear that Jack and Thunder flew F-4s, and soon let them know that he and Reza flew fighters, that he himself was actually a test pilot. They promised to talk more the next day.
Early in the morning, after a restless night, Jack decided to try the sauna, and found it was coeducational, with Jane already there, as though waiting for him…? A very nice coincidence. What the hell, he was supposed to be getting away from the pressures, personal included. She was sitting on a middle bench and patted the place beside her. She turned to him when he sat down, apparently taking his erection as a compliment. After that, there really wasn’t much to say. What happened was sex, a purging. So why didn’t he feel more satisfied?
Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Diana was languishing and despite her advances, not having any luck with Jack’s remarkably built buddy Thunder, who seemed to have found somebody else he preferred.
The Arab, Prince Reza Ibn Abdul Turika, of the Saudi royal family, was, on the other hand, pleased with his good fortune. He was impressed with the two American flyers and also listened carefully to the Frenchman Paul Rainey celebrate the technical merits of the French Mirage 2000 fighter as opposed to the much older U.S. F-4. He understood that the French government had given Paul the tough assignment of convincing him that his government should purchase new delta-wing Mirage 2000s.
Jack’s arguments came down to the crucial difference being the relative skills of individual pilots. Paul then asked the two Americans to come with him to the airfield near Nancy, where they were conducting a combat evaluation of the Mirage. He’d arrange a demonstration ride for them, he said.
The next day at the airfield the weather was cold and cloudy. When they got to the hangar Jack stopped dead in his tracks. “For God’s sake, where in hell did you get that?” He was referring to the lone occupant of the hangar — a pristine F-4E.
Paul then proceeded to tell how the F-4 was a gift from the Ayatollah in 1980, who was paying back the French for giving him asylum during the Shah’s regime — and particularly enjoyed giving a plane that had been given to the Shah originally by the Americans. The French had shipped the plane in crates to Nancy, and their technicians had only recently reassembled it and trimmed the engines. They had only flown it twice, Paul said.
“What are you going to do with it?” Jack asked him.
“We want to fly it and use it as a standard for comparison. Maybe you would like to fly it for us?”
Reza watched the exchange closely, understanding that Paul obviously assumed his Mirages would perform well and impress Reza as compared to the older American Phantom. But then he added an unexpected zinger of his own.
“Jack, I would like to fly against you in the Mirage.”
Paul protested, sure that Reza, a newly qualified pilot in the Mirage, would hardly be able to stack up against the two highly trained American pilots. But Reza insisted, and he was the potential customer. So Paul salvaged matters by urging that at least he should fly with Reza in another Mirage as his wingman. The fight would be documented, shot for shot, by video gun cameras.
Paul Rainey gave them a map and Thunder noted the location of the French GCI radar site in the center. He figured Paul would probably use it to find them and receive vectors into the engagement, which would put him and Jack at a real disadvantage. “Well, they’ve got to find us first,” Jack said. “We get low and loiter in the weeds, hide from the radar and try to make them burn up fuel looking for us. Once they get low we’ll engage them. We’ve got to make them depend on a visual contact to engage us — that’s the only way I can see to offset their radar. So… we’ve got to keep below a hundred feet and you’ve got to track them without locking onto them with our radar… their warning gear will probably react even to the search mode of our radar, so keep your search time to a minimum and your radar in standby. Think you can handle all that till it’s time to engage?”
Thunder said he could, thoroughly caught up in it now. Both of them were pushing to the back of their minds any second thoughts or possible consequences of what they were doing. They were fighter jocks. Consequences were for field grade officers and Pentagon paper pushers…
Jack taxied slowly, watching Reza and Paul takeoff, wanting the Mirages to consume as much fuel as possible while he stayed on the ground. He felt Thunder take control of the rudder pedals with his big feet and weave the bird back and forth down the taxiway. Thunder, Jack knew, was just prancing, enjoying himself, looking forward to the coming engagement.
In the control tower the controller remarked to an observer that the Americans were crazy, that they’d have no chance against the Mirages if they couldn’t even taxi straight.