“Money?” The other investigators had gone over the flight procedures and the myriad details of what had happened ad infinitum, but this came completely out of left field. “What the hell are you getting at?”
“How about York?”
“Megan York’s family’s richer than hell. One of her cousins is a congressman. What is it you want, Mr. Fisher?”
“Rest of the people on her crew? There were four all together, right, counting her?”
“You think we crashed the planes for money?”
“ ‘We’?”
Howe’s anger had risen so quickly it surprised even him. He felt as if he were looking at himself from across the room, watching his body pitch forward, his arms stiff at his sides, hands balled into fists. He stuck his face about six inches from the FBI agent’s; they were nearly the same height, with Fisher maybe an inch taller.
The agent didn’t flinch. His expression, in fact, remained the same: quizzical puzzlement mixed with a certain reserve wariness. Howe pulled his face back, sensing he’d been purposely provoked.
“I was just thinking those planes are worth a hell of a lot of cigarettes,” said Fisher.
“I don’t have time for this,” said Howe. He pushed past and out the door.
“Quick temper,” Fisher told the sergeant trailing him as he worked his way out of the rat-maze of administrative offices beneath the control-command level of the underground facility. “If this were
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said the sergeant.
“Johnson, if I accused you of taking a bribe, you’d get pissed off.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if I accused your friend of taking a bribe, you’d probably also get pissed off.”
“Yes, sir, I would.”
“Yeah, me too. I can’t see why it changes anything for Perry. But he’s the man. Come on, let’s go see if the search parties have their coffee situation straightened out.”
Chapter 5
Captain Timothy “Blaze” Robinson — known as Timmy to his friends — pulled the F-16 through its turn gently, moving his whole body as he pressured the control stick. The Falcon did a graceful bank three thousand feet above the closest peak, tiptoeing around the Canadian Rockies as if afraid to wake them. Timmy nudged the aircraft straight and level, his movements the minimum needed to keep the plane on its course. He leaned his head toward the canopy, staring out at the terrain he’d been given to comb.
The search force included a half-dozen helicopters, several small propeller-driven craft that could fly low and slow in the mountains, a J-STARS aircraft with a bushel of sensors, and a U-2R providing near-real-time IR imaging. Still, Timmy flew as if finding his downed comrades were entirely on his shoulders. No high-tech sensor, no satellite image, could do a better job than his own eyes as they hunted through the shadowy slopes below. Two other pilots had taken this same workhorse F-16 over this same terrain on earlier shifts, but Timmy tracked over it as if it were virgin territory, sure that he would see something through the haze and persistent, lingering clouds.
By rights, Timmy should be the guy they were looking for. He was one of the F/A-22V pilots and ordinarily flew as Williams’s wingman; Colonel Howe had bumped him for the test, taking lead and slotting Williams behind him.
Timmy scanned his instruments, double-checking to make sure all systems were in the green. The F-16 had a smooth, easygoing personality, a can-do attitude that matched its versatility. She wasn’t particularly well suited to the SAR role, however; the propeller-driven and helicopter assets involved in the search could fly lower and slower much more comfortably, and had more eyes available for the search. That fact was reflected in Timmy’s assigned area, well out of the primary search grid. But neither the pilot nor the F-16 herself would have admitted this. Muscling her ailerons against the sharp wind vortices tossed off by the crags, the Falcon stiffened her tail and held off the breeze, sailing across the valley with the calm aplomb of a schooner on a glass lake.
The shared radio frequency being used to coordinate the search buzzed with voices. Grandpa — the J-STARS control that was coordinating the search — shifted assets around as the clouds slowly made their way off the mountains.
In a combat zone, a specific protocol governed when an airman would “come up” or broadcast on Guard frequency, the radio channel reserved for such emergencies and monitored by all of the searchers. These special instructions or spins conserved the limited battery power of the radios and made it more difficult for an enemy to detect or home in on the transmissions. But in this situation — and sometimes even in combat — a broadcast might be made at any time, especially if the downed airman heard a search plane overhead.
Timmy tried willing a broadcast into his ear; he heard only static, and even that was faint.
This long after a crash, what were the odds that someone had survived?
Not particularly good. Nor was it likely that one of the crew would be this far north. But it was possible. Moving at a couple of hundred miles an hour, you could travel relatively far in ten minutes, fifteen. There was no radar cover close to the mountains, and it was possible the planes had stayed in the air even longer. Punch out over the clouds, get pushed around a bit by the wind, hit your head somewhere — it
The searchers suddenly began chattering. They’d spotted something in a ravine. Metal.
Though the discovery was over a hundred miles to the west, Timmy felt his pulse jump. He slipped into another turn, dipping his wing and throttling back so he was just barely above stall speed, tiptoeing over the rough terrain. Something was there. He slipped around for another look.
The F-16’s General Electric F110-GE-129IPE power plant developed roughly 30,000 pounds of thrust and could move the Fighting Falcon out to Mach 2 in a heartbeat. The power plant had been engineered specifically to increase acceleration and performance at low altitude, allowing a pilot on a bombing run to accelerate quickly after his bombs were dropped. But here he wanted to do the opposite, and the engine grumbled slightly as the pilot dialed its thrust ever lower.
Timmy flew over the spot four times, making sure it was just a rock he’d seen, not a body. On his last pass he flew barely fifty feet from the ground, moving dangerously slow, just over 140 knots. Still, it was difficult to get a good glimpse of the ground, and the interplay of terrain and shadows played tricks on his eyes. Once more he broadcast his location on Guard, asking if Williams or anyone could hear him.
Going from the F/A-22V to the F-16 was a little like trading a BMW M5 for a Honda Civic. Both aircraft were well made, but the ideas behind their designs were very different. The base F/A-22 was a cutting-edge design aimed at creating the world’s best interceptor. All of the political wrangling and bureaucratic BS involved in its procurement — such as what Timmy viewed as the absurd designation change from F-22 to F/A-22—couldn’t gum up what was, at its core, a great fighting machine.
The F/A-22V took that design considerably further — without, he might have added, the political BS, since the work was all handled “off-line” by NADT. Specially designed to work with Cyclops as part of a new-era battle element, the aircraft was arguably the most versatile and capable ever constructed.
The F-16 was a lower-cost (though not cheap) jack-of-all-trades. Depending on its configuration, it could operate as an attack plane, a Wild Weasel or anti-SAM aircraft, a close-air-support mud fighter, or an interceptor. This Block 50/52 aircraft represented a substantial improvement over the original Block 15, the Air Force’s first production model, which nudged off the assembly line in the 1970’s. Even so, its base technology was older than Timmy and even Colonel Howe, and after flying the F/A-22V, the pilot would have felt severely handicapped in the F-16 in a combat situation.
Not overmatched, though. The F-16—which was known as the Viper as well as the Fighting Falcon, its more “official” nickname — had excellent maneuverability and acceleration at near-Mach and Mach-plus speeds, attributes that played well in a knife fight. The original lack of BVR or beyond-visible-range killing ability had been corrected with the fitting of AIM-120 AMRAAMs some years before, and the Block 50/52 aircraft’s APG-68 radar, with a range between thirty and forty-five miles and the ability to track up to ten targets simultaneously, was at
