Thirty miles. He saw the distant speck appear in his windscreen.
On his situational display, he could see that the tanker was in a turn. By the time the big ship had completed the one-hundred-eighty-degree turn, Maxwell would be in position behind him.
If he didn’t flame out. He glanced down again.
Two hundred pounds.
“Chevy Five, this is Texaco. You got us in sight?”
“Gotcha, Texaco.”
“That’s good. You gonna last long enough to plug in?”
“If I don’t, you’ll be the first to know.”
Almost close enough to glide out of country. But not quite. He was down to twenty thousand feet. From this altitude, he still wouldn’t make it clear of Iraq. Maxwell checked the Colt .45 still holstered beneath his torso harness. He reached down and reassured himself he could find the ejection handle. Just in case.
The speck in the windscreen was growing in size. The big three-engine ship was still in its turn. Maxwell could see the basket-like refueling drogue trailing behind the tanker.
He reached down inside his cockpit and actuated the switch that extended the Hornet’s refueling probe.
One hundred pounds.
It was a joke among fighter pilots that air-to-air refueling was easy — except when you really needed it. You had to fly the probe that was affixed to the side of your jet into a three-foot basket dangling at the end of the tanker’s long refueling hose. If the air were turbulent or, worse, you were so filled with adrenaline that you missed the basket, then you had to back off and try again. That was providing you hadn’t broken your canopy with the flailing basket. And providing you had enough fuel for another try.
Fifty feet behind the drogue. He slid the jet down, flying beneath the great mass of the KC-10. He had no time to waste making his approach to the drogue. He had fuel for one shot.
Maxwell lined up the Hornet with the drogue, then eased forward.
Ten feet. He knew the fuel quantity was indicating zero.
Five feet. Hurry. Keep it moving.
Two feet.
Klunk. The probe poked into the center of the drogue. A bow briefly rippled down the length of the hose as the probe shoved the basket forward.
“Here comes your gas, Chevy Five,” came the voice of the tanker pilot. “Now can we get the hell out of this place?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Deliverance
Through the window on the admiral’s bridge, Maxwell could see the flat brown shoreline of Bahrain. A jagged row of modern hotels and office buildings rose above the ancient dwellings along the seafront. The Reagan had dropped anchor off Bahrain exactly twenty-five minutes ago.
Admiral Mellon, CAG Boyce, and the Reagan’s captain, Roger Stickney, sat across from Maxwell. They were listening to the tape player in the middle of the table. They heard the voice of Killer DeLancey.
“Eeeeasssy with it.”
A couple of seconds later, “Don’t go high, don’t go high!”
It was easy to imagine Spam Parker’s jet descending through the darkened sky toward the deck.
“Easy with it,” they heard DeLancey say again. “Right for line up.”
“That was a bogus line up call,” said Maxwell, “just to get her to drop the nose and go lower on the glide slope.”
A steady aural tone sounded on the tape.
“What’s that?” asked Stickney.
“He’s holding the transmit button down,” Maxwell said. “It’s blocking out the LSO’s calls on the other radio. Right now the LSO is yelling for her to add power, to wave off, but it sounds garbled to her because she’s hearing both radios transmit at once.”
Click. The tape abruptly ended. “The tape is time-stamped,” said Maxwell. “That’s exactly when Parker hit the ramp.”
For a while no one spoke.
Finally, Admiral Mellon said, “I don’t know what to say. This is just too hard to believe. Her own commanding officer killed her.”
“And then tried to kill his executive officer,” said Boyce. “You all saw Brick’s HUD tape. Killer fired a Sidewinder at him, and Brick took him out with the gun.” Boyce banged his fist on the table. “I wish I’d had the chance to shoot the sonofabitch myself.”
Stickney was shaking his head. “Killing a woman pilot, then a deliberate blue-on-blue engagement in a war zone. All based aboard America’s newest and most expensive aircraft carrier. This is going to look great on the evening news. It’s gonna make Tailhook look like a taffy pull.”
“What about Congress?” said Boyce. “Wait till that woman senator finds out how the Navy treated one of her precious female pilots.”
No one wanted to touch that one.
Admiral Mellon seemed not to be listening. He rose from the table and stood gazing toward the Bahrain shoreline, his hands clasped behind his back.
He said in a low voice, “Thirty-four years.” He continued looking out the window. “I’ve seen it all — Vietnam, the Gulf, Tailhook, the Balkans, downsizing, rebuilding, downsizing again.”
None of the officers spoke. Maxwell thought that the admiral looked old and tired. His shoulders seemed hunched, his thinning hair whiter than before.
“Enough is enough,” Mellon said, speaking to no one in particular. “I’m not going to give them another sword to use against us.”
He turned to the officers at the table. “Okay, gentlemen, get this straight. Here’s the way it’s going down. Commander John DeLancey will get a memorial service with full honors and a posthumous Navy Cross.”
The three men at the table stared at him. Boyce could not restrain himself. “But, Admiral, the sonofabitch —”
“Listen carefully, all of you. During yesterday’s strike DeLancey shot down another enemy aircraft, becoming the first active-duty ace since the Vietnam war. He is a national hero. Regardless of what else he did, we won’t take that away from him.”
Boyce shook his head. “Admiral, that still doesn’t account for what he did to Spam Parker. And it doesn’t explain how he happened to get killed.”
“DeLancey was killed in action. We don’t know how. He was the last jet out of the target area. Whether it was a SAM or a MiG or a lucky AA hit, we’ll never know.”
“What about the AWACS controllers? Don’t they have an idea what happened?”
“I’ll call Joe Penwell, the Joint Task Force Commander. He doesn’t want this to explode in our faces any more than we do.”
“What about the tapes?” said Stickney. “Brick’s HUD tape and that audio tape we just heard prove that DeLancey was a murderer.”
Mellon didn’t reply. He walked over to the VCR and extracted the HUD cassette. Then he picked up the audio tape player and ejected the tape. Ignoring the curious stares of the three men at the table, Mellon pulled a metal gun case from his desk drawer. He slipped the two cassettes into the case.
He shoved open the door to the outside catwalk. Using a sidearm swing, he hurled the case in a high arcing path, over the rail and out to sea. He watched the gun case disappear in the murky water.
Admiral Mellon strode back into the flag bridge. “What tapes?”
No one answered.
He dusted his hands off and said, “That, gentleman, was probably the last significant act of my naval career.”
“Sir?” said Stickney. “You don’t mean you’re —”
The admiral picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. “My orders came in on the fax this morning. I’m being relieved.”
The three officers stared at him, surprised.