Sculley shifted in his chair. "Ah, Your Honor:"
"Mr. Sculley, you are trying my patience. That is the second time today and no one has ever done it a third time. Now get back out there, all of you, and let’s get this farce over with."
They were still in the traffic pattern when Charlie got a radio call that obviously displeased him. He reached over to the microphone jack and wiggled it firmly. "Say again tower, you’re breaking up. Over." Thanks to Charlie’s fiddling the transmission was nicely garbled.
The old pilot chewed his mustache for an instant as he listened to the transmission, then he reached down and switched off the radio. "Pissants," Charlie yelled to Mick.
Charlie did not waste a lot of time gathering altitude. While they were in the tower’s control zone he made a pretense of staying above the FAA minimums. As soon as they were beyond visual range of the tower and over the open desert he pushed the wheel forward.
As an ex-fighter jock, Mick Gilligan was a member of the high-and-fast school of flying. Charlie, on the other hand, belonged to the "low and slow" school. Gilligan had no objection to flying low-within reason. But he considered having to pull up to get over barbed wire fences decidedly unreasonable. A couple of times Gilligan saw puffs of dust where the Colt’s wheels had touched the ground. After that he tried not to look.
Back in the cabin the other passengers had their own problems. Flying sideways is unsettling, the noise and vibration were terrible, and the humans were sharing the space with a dragon who’d never been in an airplane before. Fluffy didn’t get airsick, but he wasn’t a very good traveling companion. Although he was too young to fly the dragon had the reflexes of a flying creature, which meant he kept trying to use his body to control his "flight." Moira tried valiantly to keep the body under control, but with very mixed success. Every time the plane lurched, Fluffy instinctively tried to spread his wings. After being smacked in the face a couple of times, the occupants of the seats learned to duck when the plane lurched.
"They’re not responding," the air traffic control supervisor told his visitors. Lake most air traffic controllers, the supervisor had a strong sense of what was proper. In his book having a bunch of police and other gawkers invade his control center was highly improper. However, as an ex-Air Force controller he was disinclined to argue. The best he could do was keep them out of his people’s hair, be civil to them and hope they would get out of his control center soon.
"Isn’t that illegal? Ignoring air traffic control?" asked one of his visitors, a blocky middle-aged man in an expensive suit. The supervisor had already sized him up as the one who was running this show. The police captain and other officers, as well as the gaggle of civil servants from federal and state agencies, didn’t seem to count for much.
"Maybe their radios are out," the supervisor said, more to annoy his unwanted guests than out of any belief. Charlie had only been in town for a couple of weeks on this visit, but already the controllers knew him and his plane.
"Where are they going?"
The supervisor glanced over a controller’s shoulder. "North and a little east."
"Didn’t they file a flight plan?"
"Yeah, but they’ve already deviated from it. Besides, according to the plan they’re coming back here."
"Well, stop them," the suit snapped. The supervisor just looked at him until he realized now stupid that was and reddened.
It’s easier dealing with the DEA, the supervisor thought.
"I mean, can you alert the airports within range and have them report when it lands?" the suit asked in a lame attempt to cover himself.
"If they land at an airport. From the looks of that plane it can set down on any strip of flat desert from here to Idaho."
The suit clearly didn’t like that. The police captain, on the other hand, seemed less concerned. Clearly he was just glad to get the problem out of his jurisdiction.
"Well," said the civilian, obviously trying to control his temper, "can you follow them on radar?"
"For a while. But they’re descending rapidly. If they get right down on the deck we’ll lose them in the clutter."
"How fast can you get a plane after them?" one of the lesser suits asked. The supervisor shrugged. "Ask the police, or maybe the DEA. Or you may have to rent something."
The suit turned to look at the police captain.
"We’ve got an air unit that can follow them for a while," the cop said.
"Don’t worry about following them too far," the supervisor told the visitors.
"They’re headed into restricted airspace. If they don’t change course pretty soon the Air Force will take care of them."
"What will they do?" the suit asked.
"If they don’t break off? Then they’re going to overfly Area Fifty-One. The Air Force is real touchy about uninvited visitors there."
The suit looked apprehensive. "But what will they do about it?"
"Intercept them. Try to get them to land." The supervisor shrugged. "In the worst case they’ll blow them out of the sky."
"We are getting close," Kuznetsov yelled in Mick Gilligan’s ear.
Mick didn’t recognize the terrain, but he didn’t need the Russian to tell him where they were. They’d crossed the highway some time back, pulling up so they didn’t collide with any cars or trucks and scaring the heck out of a couple of tourists. By now they had to be inside the restricted airspace that surrounded the base and soon they’d be over the line on the base itself.
The Russian leaned over Mick’s shoulder and pointed at a nondescript building on top of a nearby mountain.
"Radar station," Kuznetzov shouted over the noise of the engine. "Normally would have been eliminated by speznatzм, but no speznatzм, so:" He shrugged. Gilligan turned in his seat to look at him closely. "What in the hell are you?" he yelled.
"I told you," Kuznetsov shouted back, "I am a businessman."
"Yeah, but what did you used to be?"
"Used to be businessmen were parasites and enemies of people. So I was good Communist like everybody else."
"Heads up!" Charlie called. "Here comes company."
It only took Mick an instant to pick up the two dots headed toward them. They quickly grew and resolved into the gray shark shapes of a pair of F-16s. This is a nightmare, Mick thought I’m going to wake up soon and find out this whole thing is just a nightmare. But the F-16s kept coming.
I should have gotten out back in 1978 when I was still a captain, Major General Paul Manley thought as he stared at the radar plot. Outwardly everyone in the command center was cool and professional, but you could feel the tension rising. Right now the tensest place in the room was the pit of General Manley’s stomach. Unusually for the Air Force, General Manley was not an experienced combat pilot. Even his tour in Vietnam had been spent pulling pilots out of the jungle with Air Rescue rather than dropping bombs. For the first time in his career as an Air Force officer he was probably going to have to kill someone.