The First Billion

62

The safe course was to keep the plane low, respect a two-hundred-foot ceiling, bleed the speed to five hundred miles per hour, well under supersonic, and take the Mig for a sunset cruise over the rooftops of Eastern Europe. A check of the instruments showed what Gavallan thought of the safe course. Speed: 650 knots. Altitude: 30,000 feet and climbing. Screw the safe course. It was long gone anyway. He’d thrown safety to the wind when he’d busted into Ray Luca’s home in Delray Beach Friday afternoon. No, he decided, he’d chucked it earlier than that. He even had the date: January 10, somewhere around three o’clock, when after a boozy lunch at Alfred’s in the financial district, he’d signed Konstantin Kirov as a client and pledged Black Jet Securities’ every effort to make the Mercury offering a grand slam.

Rolling his shoulders, Gavallan tried to get comfortable in the scooped-out seat. One hand fought the stick. He was holding it too rigidly, nudging the aircraft left every few seconds to compensate for a slight oversteer. The other hand rested on the throttle like a leaden weight, keeping his airspeed steady.

A click of his thumb activated the intercom. “How ya doin’?”

Cate sat beside him in her own self-enclosed turret, his airsick RIO, or radar intercept officer, in her sky blue flight suit and pearl white helmet. “Alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”

“We’re about eleven hundred miles out,” he said. “Another two hours and we’ll be on friendly soil.”

“Just hurry, Jett.”

Cate had greeted the initial rush of speed with an exhilarated “Wow!” and then, a few seconds later, as they’d slowed dramatically, a less enthusiastic “Uh-oh.” She’d used two of Grushkin’s doggy bags, and Gavallan didn’t think there was anything left in her tummy for a third.

“I am,” he said. “You can count on it.”

Gavallan released his thumb and turned his eyes back to the bank of instruments. He’d expected it to be easier than this. He’d expected it all to come right back, as if sliding into the cockpit after an eleven-year break were the same thing as slipping on an old jacket and finding that it still fit. Instead, the seat felt tight on his bottom. The cockpit was much too small, the stick unresponsive. It wasn’t a question of whether he could still fly. He could. The Mig was not especially challenging in that regard. The cockpit configuration was similar to that of the A-10 he’d piloted prior to going into the Stealth program. Aircraft design dictated that form follow function and the throttle, stick, and navigation systems were all in similar places. The gauges and the heads-up display, or HUD, with their Cyrillic lettering might be difficult to read and the airspeed indicator was in kilometers, not knots per hour, but when it came down to it, the Mig was just another jet. All the same, he was flying poorly, stiffly, with no grace, no feel for the aircraft. Even the familiar tightness of the G suit around his thighs and across his stomach, the shoulder harness’s stiff bite, failed to comfort him.

Relax, he told himself. You were born to do this. Born to fly.

The words set him on a slingshot journey back through time in which he reviewed his every accomplishment as a pilot. Baghdad. Tonopah. Colorado Springs. The images shot past his mind’s eye with increasing speed, faster and faster, one on top of the other, blurred, ill-focused, until just as quickly they froze and he saw himself at age fifteen, lying on the hood of his father’s Chevy on a hot summer night in Texas. The car was a hot rod, a fire engine red ’68 Camaro with a 454 engine, twin chrome exhausts, and a white racing stripe painted down the hood. After spending all afternoon washing and waxing it, he’d driven twenty miles outside of town and parked in the middle of the open plain where alone in the gathering dusk, he could watch the jets from Beeville Air Station, fifty miles to the north, screech across the sky. He would lie there for an hour, looking up at their gleaming silver bodies, listening to their engines shake the very pillars of the sky, dreaming upon the white contrails they left behind. He was born to fly. It had come to him with a certainty that was raw and cold and frightening. Shivering in the ninety-nine-degree dusk, he’d known he belonged up there.

So, fly, he told himself now. Relax and fly, goddamn it.

He gazed at the countryside below. The sun had fallen below the horizon, and its waning rays burnt the Earth’s cusp a flaming ochre. The sky above was dark and supple and inviting.

Gavallan’s eyes fell to the radar array, a square black screen six inches by six inches located on the instrument console. The screen was dark except for his own orange blip and a flashing triangle that was a passenger jet ninety miles to the north. He’d been flying for an hour, and so far he had detected no sign of Russian air patrols. Either Grushkin was a man of his word or Russian air defenses were perilously lax.

Checking his coordinates on the heads-up satellite navigation system, he put the plane into a seventy-degree roll and brought his heading to west-southwest. Doing some quick math, he figured he’d put the bird down at Ramstein Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt at around 10 P.M. local time. From then on, they’d be living on the good graces of others.

Five minutes passed. Gavallan checked his coordinates against a map on his knee and decided he was somewhere just south of Kraców, Poland, safely out of Russian airspace. “We’re going to start looking mighty suspicious to our flyboys anytime now,” he said to Cate. “Time to call ahead and give the boys in blue our arrival time.” He checked his radio log and dialed in Ramstein Air Force Base, home to the 86th Airlift Wing. As he keyed the mike a second time, a steady howl sounded outside his earphones. At the same time, a red square blinked on his console. Fire. Starboard engine. His eyes kicked right. The gauge showing the exhaust gas temperature was maxed out, full in the red. He pulled the handle to activate the fire extinguisher and cut fuel flow to the engine. At the same time, he cut back on the throttle, shut down the engine, and put the plane into a steep dive. A check over his shoulder revealed nothing. But the gauge didn’t lie.

The plane shuddered, as if hit from the side.

“Jett!”

“Hold on, sweetheart, just a little problem.”

“What is it?”

Gavallan’s heart was racing; a lump lodged high in his throat. The stick was bucking in his hand. He jerked it to the right, but there was no response. A high-pitched buzz saw whined in his earphones. He was losing control of the aircraft.

This isn’t my plane, he protested silently. I haven’t trained in a Mig. A second check over his shoulder showed flames licking the wing. Immediately he hit the auxiliary extinguisher, and a gust of white puffed from beneath the wing. The flames flickered, then disappeared.

And then the world turned upside down on him. The Mig rolled over and went nose down, spinning in a slow roll.

“Jett, help us. Stop this. Oh, God… no, no!”

Gavallan looked at Cate, her eyes wide with terror, her helmet pinned to the canopy.

A voice inside him whispered, You were born to fly. So, relax and fly.

“Just a little glitch,” he said, in the voice Grafton Byrnes had taught him that hot and sunny day in Alamagordo. “Not to worry.”

Still inverted, he pulled back on the stick, depressed the ailerons to stop the spin, and pulled the nose through. Gently he goosed the port engine. The single turbine hummed confidently. It was working. The plane was responding to his touch. He was guiding the aircraft instead of allowing it to guide him. A well of confidence grew in his chest, warm and reassuring. It was the pilot’s bravado coming back. The certainty he could do anything, if by sheer force of will alone.

And there, as he plummeted toward the earth at four hundred miles an hour, a dam burst in his mind. A clarity of thought, of memory, of action, came to him that he had not possessed for years.

Priority One. Ring One.

The words struck him like a lightning bolt.

The attack on Abu Ghurayb. Saddam’s Presidential palace.

He saw himself in the cockpit of the F-117—no, damn it, he is there… the stick between his legs, the joystick to his left, the infrared display screens. He is there. Inside Darling Lil, ten thousand feet above the Iraqi desert.

He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles a switch. Bomb armed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. His finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red lights fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the pickle and the weapons bay door opens. Darling Lil shudders. He depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. He feels the aircraft jerk upward, as if freed from its moorings.

As the bomb falls, his eyes lock onto the IR screen and the delicate crosshairs positioned over the east wing of the Presidential palace. All external stimuli disappear. He is in a tunnel. At the far end rests his target. Thumb locked. The crosshairs do not move.

“Thunder three-six. Red Leader One. Copy?”

The bomb appears on the screen. A lethal black dot skimming across the ground at an impossible speed. A red light blinks. A fuel warning. Tanks low. Gavallan pays it no mind. It will wait.

“Roger Red One. Come in.”

“Friendlies in the area. We have friendlies on-site. Abort run. I repeat: Abort run.”

At the sound of the word “friendlies,” Gavallan’s finger is already moving, skewing the crosshairs away from the palace, guiding the “smart bomb” away from the American troops.

On the console, a second light blinks—yellow, urgent. It is the Allied Forces Locator warning him he has engaged friendly forces.

“Abort run! Confirm, Thunder three-six!”

But the pilot’s instincts have beaten the verbal command by a second, maybe two. An eternity in the electronic world that can be translated into two hundred fifty feet of fall time.

Gavallan keeps his thumb pressed to the right, ordering the bomb to follow his instructions. But the bomb does not listen. She has been on her downward trajectory too long and it is as if she is too stubborn to alter her course.

The desert flower blossoms. The IR screen blanches. A blizzard of white noise. The palace reappears. The east wing is no more, a bonfire of angles fallen in on itself. The heat signatures have disappeared, too, replaced by the blotchy, pulsing quasars that indicate fire.

Inside the Mig, Gavallan lets the images fade away. He has seen enough. In an instant, the past has vanished. But it is a different past than the one he has known. A different reality than the one he has lived with these eleven years. No longer will he question his response, second-guess his reflexes. He knows now that he did everything he could, more even, to prevent the bomb from injuring American Marines. Governed by his instincts, he ordered the bomb off its course even before he himself had fully received the command. If his actions were not sufficient to save the lives of ten men, to prevent two others from being robbed of their ability to live full and decent lives, they were still all he could demand of himself. He was an accessory, yes, and for that he would always feel horror and revulsion. But he would no longer feel the guilt, the shame, the dishonor, no longer believe that it was his own poor reactions that had caused those tragic events.

He would never be free of that night, but he was no longer its prisoner.

Slowly, the nose righted itself and the wings found the horizon. The plane shuddered again and was still. They were gliding on a lake of ice.

“Just a little engine problem,” he said to Cate. “All taken care of. Sit tight. I’ll have us down in a jif.”

“Hurry, Jett… thank you… but hurry.”

“Roger that.”

Bringing the airspeed down to 250 miles an hour, Gavallan let go a long breath. The Mig flew straight on its course, a black eagle skipping across the European sky.

Ramstein Tower, this is United States Air Force Captain John Gavallan, retired. Serial number 276-99-7200. I’ve got a Russian Mig under my butt that I’d like to put down at your place. You should have word about our arrival. Copy?”

“Copy, Captain Gavallan. Sorry, but we have no word of your status. You are negative for a landing. Please exit secure airspace immediately.” There was a pause, and the communications link crackled with white noise. A new voice sounded in Gavallan’s earphones. “Captain Gavallan, this is Major Tompkins. You are roger for a landing. Please proceed to vector two seven four, descend to fifteen thousand feet. Welcome back to the Air Force.”

“Roger that,” said Gavallan. Same old. Same old.

At 10:07 local time, Gavallan brought the Mig to a perfect three-point touchdown on runway two-niner at Ramstein Air Force Base, thirty miles south of Frankfurt, Germany. A jeep waited at the end of the runway, blue siren flashing, to guide them to their parking spot. Gavallan followed at a distance, keeping his ground speed to a minimum. Finding his spot, he killed the engines. Airmen dashed beneath the Mig and threw blocks under his tires. Gavallan waited until they reappeared, flashing him the “thumbs-up,” before opening his canopy and unbuckling his seat harness.

The twin, rounded hooks of a flight ladder coupled onto the fuselage and, reluctantly, he climbed out of the cockpit. He stopped at the bottom rung, not wanting his foot to touch the ground. The crackle of avionics still echoed in his ear. The “by the seat of your pants” rush that came with flying a jet lingered inside him like a melancholy phantom. For a few seconds he listened to the cry of the turbine engines winding down and sniffed at the burnt rubber and let the wind brush his cheek. Technically, he owned the plane, but he had no plans to fly it again. Jets belonged to his past, and he knew well enough not to look back.

Jumping to the ground, he jogged around the nose of the aircraft to help Cate out of the cockpit. “Never again,” she said. “And you did that for a living?”

“It’s not so bad once you get the hang of it.”

A major in neatly pressed blues approached. “Captain Gavallan? I’m Calvin Tompkins, executive officer in charge of field security. Welcome to Ramstein.”

Gavallan accepted the outstretched hand. “This is Miss Magnus.”

“Evening, ma’am,” Tompkins said, offering a crisp nod of the head. “I understand you two are headed stateside.”

“We need some transportation. The Mig’s got a lousy range—fifteen hundred miles max.”

“If you’ll follow me, I’m sure we can accommodate you. We’ve got a Lear fueling up as we speak, courtesy of Mr. Howell Dodson of the FBI. I’m afraid it doesn’t have such wonderful range either. You’ll have to stop in Shannon, Ireland, to refuel, but it’ll have you to New York by morning. We had you scheduled for ten forty-five, but I’m afraid we’ve hit a bit of a glitch.”

“A glitch?” asked Cate, her voice taut.

“Just a solenoid that needs replacing,” said Tompkins. “Should have it changed out any sec.”

Gavallan knew his luck had been too good. “So what’s the new departure time?”

“Right now, we’re looking at a midnight ETD.”

“Midnight?”

“And you shouldn’t have to dally in Shannon long. An hour tops.”

Gavallan scratched the back of his neck, rejiggering his math. Takeoff at midnight. Hit Shannon by two-thirty. Takeoff from Ireland at three-thirty. Setting the whole operation to New York time, they’d land at JFK around six o’clock. Enough time should everything go according to schedule.

“Just one question, Captain Gavallan.”

“Yeah?”

Tompkins pointed to the Mig behind them. “What exactly do you want us to do with your plane?”