briefing.
The good news was that it would be a shorter mission than those to which Troy had been accustomed before his grounding. The bad news was that it was over Sudan. The front in the war had crept much closer to Atbara.
Troy was happy beyond words to be back in the saddle again, but he was hoping that his first mission after the grounding would be routine. The last time he had this stick in his fist, he had been thumbing a trigger that killed a MiG — and created an international incident.
About four hundred clicks south of Atbara, Falcon Force descended from a cool, cloudless fifteen thousand feet to a hazy fifteen hundred. In this arid desert, ground fog was rare. The haze that pilots often encountered was the remnant of the incessant dust storms that made life in Sudan generally unpleasant for aficionados of fresh air.
The target for the day was not a place on a map, but a set of coordinates in a trackless desert north of Al Qadarif. The ISR Sigint interpreters somewhere back behind the front lines had decided that these coordinates marked the spot where the Al-Qinamah had located the command post that directed their attacks on UN Forces east of Khartoum.
A bunch of ragtag punks. That's what Troy's mother had called Al-Qinamah. Others — a lot of others — had called them worse — a lot worse — and they were. It seemed counterintuitive that punks riding around on donkeys could be so sophisticated in their technological expertise that it took AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 electronic pods to keep tabs on them.
Falcon Force dropped to two hundred feet.
It was showtime.
For today's mission, both Hal and Troy were carrying pods, with Jenna flying off Troy's left wing with HARMs.
Below, in the ocean of dirt, there would be no landmarks, no mosque spires of a rebel-held city, only a camouflaged communications hub that American eyes would not see but American ISR pods would hear.
If the bad guys were smart — as often they were — there would be no position-revealing ground fire. They knew that in Eritrea, rules of engagement prevented the Americans from attacking them, but here in Sudan, the American jets they heard approaching were likely to have a hellstorm of cluster bombs beneath their wings.
Today, at least one bad guy wasn't smart.
'Tracers at one o'clock,' Jenna reported.
'ZSU?' Troy asked.
'Smaller. Just a quick burst. Probably a nut with an AK.'
The pilots usually ignored small-arms shooters with no chance of hitting a fast-moving jet — and it was pointless for them to try to hit back at a target so small and so easily concealed.
'We're on top of the target… now,' Hal reported.
It was merely a formality. Hal and Troy had already lit their AN/APY-77 and AN/ASD-83 gear, and it was working autonomously.
'Didn't see anything,' Troy said.
There was nothing to see. A few seconds after Hal had said the word now, they were already ten miles from the target.
'Hiding in a hole probably,' Jenna said with disdain for the Al-Qinamahs back there.
'Climbing to flight level one-five-five,' Hal said. 'Roger one-five-five,' Jenna said calmly. 'One-five-five and home,' Troy said. 'Ugh. Come on you, what's the—'
'Falcon Three, what's up?' Hal asked.
'Some kind of fuel issue… Getting sluggish performance.'
'Can you climb to one-five-five?'
'Maybe… ugh… no. I'd better level out at five-five,' Troy said, opting not to climb any higher because his aircraft was not behaving properly.
'We're with you, Falcon Three,' Jenna said, leveling out at Troy's altitude.
'Roger, five-five,' Hal confirmed, doing the same. Guess we must actually be a team, Troy thought to himself.
It startled Troy to discover that the others were dropping back to his altitude. Long ago, deep in a wilderness, Troy had deliberately abandoned Hal. Today, high over another wilderness, Hal had deliberately not abandoned Troy.
A few minutes later, Troy's warm fuzzy feeling was jolted — literally — as his F-16 began to shiver. He looked at the fuel gauge. It was dropping much faster than it should be. His left wing tank was nearly empty, increasing the weight on the right and making the plane hard to control.
'Falcon Three here, I'm losing fuel… pretty fast, too.'
'You okay to Atbara?' Hal asked.
'Think so,' Troy said. 'Left wing tank is dry and I'm having trouble pumping from the aft tank. Right wing… very heavy.'
The F-16 shivered again.
Troy was doing his best to adjust the crossflow of fuel, but his whole fuel system was misbehaving, and not enough was reaching the engine. The aircraft was slowly losing altitude.
Would he be able to maintain his altitude long enough to reach Atbara?
Below, the trackless desert raced beneath his wings. What if he had to punch out?
A SAR chopper could reach him in an hour or so. If there were no bad guys around, it would be a mere inconvenience. If there were bad guys, then it could be — probably would be — all over.
'Seven minutes out,' Hal said calmly after what seemed to Troy like an eternity of fighting to keep his plane from slumping to the ground. 'Falcon Three, go on in first.'
'Atbara approach,' Troy called. 'This is Falcon Three… I'm declaring an emergency… coming in bingo fuel.'
'Roger Falcon Three, we have your flight on the scope, you're cleared to land at your discretion. We are vectoring other traffic out of the approach pattern…. will you need assistance on the ground?'
'Not if I make it as far as the runway,' Troy said, half joking. He knew that he could land the F-16 if he could get it to the runway, if he could get it on the runway. If he didn't make it to the runway, they could take their time picking up the pieces.
As he banked left to line the aircraft up with the strip of asphalt in the distance, Troy felt the F-16 shudder and fall.
Starved of fuel, the 3,700-pound Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 had just quit.
The lump in Troy's throat seized like the fuel line to the engine, and he yanked back on the stick in an effort not to lose any more altitude until he reached the runway.
He was coming in fast and low, low enough that he imagined he could see the expressions on the faces of the guys on the donkeys in the desert just beneath him.
The higher-than-normal airspeed kept his momentum up and contributed to his keeping the aircraft up, but coming in fast and low was not the best way to land an F-16.
The fast-forward momentum was not Troy's best friend, it was his only friend. It was the only thing that was keeping his nose above the top of the perimeter fence. It would also mean that if the F-16 hit the ground before the runway, the destruction would be so complete and so fast that Troy would feel no pain.
From above and behind, Jenna watched Troy's F-16 racing toward the runway, flying in formation with its own shadow. She watched the airplane and shadow merge into one as the F-16 dropped to an altitude of practically zero.
Jenna gritted her teeth, noting that Troy still had a quarter of a mile — an endless distance under these circumstances — to go before he was over the runway.
She expected at any moment to see the F-16 suddenly turn into a tumbling cartwheel of scrap metal.
Through her mind dashed the images of this aggravating asshole of a man and his self-centered behavior at every turn. Yet despite this, she yearned, even prayed, that he would not die.
She stared at him, ahead and below, for those few seconds that stretched to eternity.
Suddenly, the airplane was engulfed in a gray cloud.
