here have the same mission and the same problem, with wives and families who just don’t understand where they go all those extra evenings when the rest of their squadron is at home or having barbecues.
The last strap is being snapped in place and the young crew chief runs over his checklist, showing the removed ejection seat pins and getting the requisite nod from his pilot.
At least, Owen thinks, the air conditioned temperature maintained in the hangar is a blessing. He’ll taxi into the desert heat in comfort.
The side of the hangar is in motion now, large hydraulic arms moving the counterbalanced facade up and over as he runs the checklist and starts the engine, timing the start of his quick exit for the moment the marshaler signals the door is clear. His takeoff and flight clearance have already been granted on a special UHF frequency and the airfield is silent, awaiting his departure. He finishes the last checklist item and smoothly swings the Delta Dart onto the runway, bringing the power to maximum and then plugging in the afterburner as he accelerates, the unusually long missile held snugly inside the weapons bay. He passes eighty knots with a glance to his left. The building is a building again, the door closed, the crew invisible, and he pulls the bird into the air, cleaning up gear and flaps and burner as he turns for the intercept point somewhere to the southeast.
The missile has been designed to launch itself, just like the original test back in 1985, but at nearly ninety thousand feet. And the trajectory is not what they’ve practiced. Instead of a head-on shot, it will go for an intercept from a forty-five-degree angle from the back.
He’s already had the classified briefing on what they’re trying to do, and there’ll be only one chance. If they miss, on the very next orbit ninety minutes later the old Russian missile shroud will impact the spacecraft, obliterating both.
But his equipment is improved from the old days. The first and only successful test had none of the sophisticated onboard guidance computers he has now, and the missile was more or less a dumb infrared tracker. The pilot of that test plane, Doug Pearson, had become the first and only “space ace,” the first to shoot down a spacecraft.
Yet, the seriousness of the mission is not lost on him. The stakes couldn’t be higher. He’s trained to take out an enemy’s orbiting eyes or an orbiting nuke if anyone is ever stupid enough to put one up. But this is a different type of shooting.
Owen engages the trajectory computer and locks his global positioning satellite system into the data stream, pleased to see the green light flash on his screen. The flight director pops into view and he places the dot representing the F-106 in the middle, following the computer commands to the start point. The mission is to be flown in radio silence, except for his transponder and an open satcom channel to the mission commander back in the Pentagon. He’s closing on the hold point where he’ll fly a racetrack pattern for thirty minutes waiting for the precise moment to start the run, and he looks over to check the fuel remaining, momentarily disbelieving the figures.
He should be reading a full tank but it’s coming up short. Disastrously short, and he wonders if the fuel totalizer could be wrong.
A quick mental calculation deflates that possibility, and he toggles the UHF radio back to the ground crew’s frequency at Holloman, triggering a series of messages that end with the realization that someone screwed up big- time.
There’s no time to scare up a tanker. He runs the numbers again, the planned fuel burn during the antisatellite launch run and the fuel between now and then, plus the fuel back to the base.
They don’t match. If he uses the most fuel-efficient speed to hold, he’ll still flame-out on the way back down from launch altitude.
The thought is chilling, shoving an engineless F-106 back through the stratosphere and stretching the energy enough to make the home runway.
But that, too, won’t work. He’d end up crashing in the desert fifty miles short or worse.
The call to the command post in the Pentagon is tough but crucial, and there’s a momentary flurry of confusion until a general comes on the line.
“Bluebird Two-Three, Stargazer. You do realize we have no other options on this mission?”
“Roger, Stargazer. I can’t believe we’re short. I don’t suppose there are any tankers airborne nearby?”
“Negative. We just looked at that, and there’s no time to go back. Can you make the launch work?”
“Yes, sir. That I can do, but I’ll flame out on the way down.”
“We’re considering a punch-out scenario here.”
Owen’s finger freezes on the transmit button for a few seconds. Punch out of a perfectly good F-106? Worse, a specially modified F-106? A hundred million dollars or more reduced to junk because one of his team failed to read the tanks?
“Stargazer, there’s an alternate airport below my flight path. Civilian and short, but I can probably make it in dead stick.”
“Which one?”
“Carlsbad Muni, sir.”
Silence for a few seconds before a cautious reply reaches his ears.
“Your choice, Bluebird Two-Three. You are authorized to leave the ship or take it in without power to Carlsbad. We’ll scramble a team there right now just in case.”
“Roger.”
“Hey, Bluebird… a personal note from an old fighter pilot, okay? Don’t wait too long if you have to leave her. Eject inside the envelope. Got it?”
“Roger, sir.”
Chapter 21
Satisfied that his parentals have quieted down at long last, Alastair Wood slides out of bed and quietly pads across the cold floor of his room. He pulls on a thick robe before sitting at his desk and firing up his most prized possession—a computer with a flat screen monitor and the high-speed Internet connection that was his main gift for his just-celebrated twelfth birthday.
The sleepy look and deep circles under his eyes he carries to school these days are worth it for the midnight hours he usually spends at the keyboard, but tonight has been a disappointment. It was shaping up at first to be a bonus with his father and mother doing their lock-the-door intimate thing at ten, but two hours have gone by. Now all he’ll have is three uninterrupted hours before having to hit the sack as usual at three to be up by seven.
While so many of his school chums have their heads buried in video games, he’s touring the world real time every night. And it
His father will never understand of course, and he’s tired of being called a geek whenever he’s discovered hunched over the keyboard at some ungodly hour. He loves his dad, even though he knows he’s a hopeless dinosaur when it comes to computers and communication, thinking his GSM cell phone is cutting edge. Alastair can’t bring himself to tell him that they’ve had the same phones in Africa for over a decade.
The operating system goes through its start-up routine and he waits it out, reviewing his surfing plan for the next few hours. A new bulletin board from England, a number of Web sites in the U.S.—including one featuring bikini shots of famous actresses—and an attempt to hack into a poorly protected Internet e-mail provider are all on the
