In less time than it took for the image to travel from eye to brain, she realized that this was merely the burning rubber of a dead-stick aircraft's tires hitting a runway at high speed.
Aboard that dead-stick aircraft, Troy had waited painfully long before dropping his landing gear, so long that he was not sure the gear was fully extended when he hit the runway.
He clenched his teeth, waiting for the ground loop that never came.
The hotdogger quickly replaced the man who had almost died, and Troy used his last spurt of momentum to turn neatly off the runway and onto the taxiway as though nothing had happened.
Chapter 10
'Thanks, man,' Troy said sheepishly.
'Thanks for what?' Hal Coughlin asked.
The two men were walking from their quarters to the briefing room. Barely eighteen hours after Troy had landed with two lucky nine-millimeter holes in his fuel system, the Falcon Force was going out again.
'I thought about that day, that night, y'know, out in the Colville,' Troy said. 'I thought about how I left you… and then… I was in trouble out there yesterday by Al Qadarif… and you didn't leave me.'
'You made it back on your own,' Hal said. 'You didn't need anything I did… nothing that Munrough did. We couldn't do anything but watch.'
'Still, it's the thought that counts,' Troy said appreciatively.
'I don't want you dead,' Hal said. 'As hard as that may be for you to believe, I don't want to see you dead. When I was lying on my back in the hospital, I probably would have shot you if you came through that door…. but…'
'Thanks for that… I guess…'
'I don't want you being dead on my conscience,' Hal said.
'I don't want it there either,' Troy agreed, ducking into the head, as much to get away from an awkward moment as to get rid of the remnants of the three cups of coffee in his bladder.
As he emerged, he noticed Hal at the end of the hallway. Jenna was there too. Neither saw him or looked in his direction. This was not the least bit unusual; everyone was headed to the same briefing. However, they were standing awfully close to one another, closer than two pilots usually stood next to one another — much closer.
Pilots who were part of the same flight were supposed to work closely, but there was something more to this. Troy was about to accuse himself of overthinking the situation when he saw their hands touch — not accidentally, nor for just a split second. Then, for a split second, he saw Munrough's hand touch the back of Coughlin's flight suit. Aha, there was more to it than met the eye.
Any briefing that begins with a sentence containing the phrase not going to be easy is one of those that gets your attention.
The first slide on the screen looked like someone had splattered pink paint on a pale blue wall.
'This is the Dahlak Archipelago,' Harris intoned. 'Bunch of islands east of Eritrea in the Red Sea. Intel had it that the Al-Qinamah heavy weapons are being transshipped through here. They get shipped out of Iran or North Korea or wherever, come into the Red Sea, and get landed here. Then they shuffle 'em onto small boats and bring 'em ashore on the mainland.'
'Lot of islands there,' Hal said. 'I lost track counting at two dozen.'
'They tell us that there's a hundred twenty-four of 'em,' Harris said. 'Trouble is, we don't know where the hell they're bringing the stuff in.'
'And so you send a recon flight out there to find out,' Troy suggested.
'Clever boy, Loensch.' Jenna laughed sarcastically.
'Obviously it's better that nobody with radar sees you coming,' Harris said, ignoring her taunting banter. 'You'll fly low, so you'll need to carry extra fuel. Fly east, cross over the coast and turn south across the Red Sea at two hundred feet or less. You'll be sucking whitecaps as you go.'
'Why not head due east? It's a lot shorter,' Hal suggested, pointing at the screen. Harris had a map of the entire region up now. The route that Harris had described took a roundabout track to the target.
'Because,' Harris said in an exasperated tone. 'The shortest distance between two places takes you right over the Eritrean population centers… practically over their capital… I do not think you clowns want to be tangling with the Eritrean Air Force again….. Am I right?'
'Right,' Hal agreed. 'I guess we don't want any more international incidents.'
'Guess not,' Jenna agreed, glancing at Troy with a wry grin.
It was the kind of glance that instinctively elicits a wink when you see it, but remembering what he'd seen in the hallway before the briefing, Troy simply stared back, his expression unchanged, then glanced back at the screen.
The flight out of Sudanese airspace was uneventful, but the wavetop run over the Red Sea was challenging. The guidebooks all tell you that the daytime weather over this placid lake between two deserts is clear and sunny ninety-nine percent of the time, but pilots know that the same unsettled air at low altitude that kicks up killer sandstorms over land can also kick up killer turbulence over the water. At two hundred feet, it was a white-knuckle ride as they dodged both downdrafts and the masts of supertankers bound for the Suez Canal.
At last the khaki-colored lumps of the Dahlak islands loomed ahead.
'Dropping tanks,' Hal said.
'Tanks,' Troy confirmed, feeling the F-16 bob upward as his auxiliary fuel tanks tumbled into the Red Sea. Without them, the aircraft would be lighter and somewhat easier to manage, but each plane was still encumbered with more than the usual payload of recon gear.
'Falcon Three, breaking right,' Troy said. Each member of the team had a particular flight path and a particular set of islands to survey.
'Falcon Two, left,' Jenna confirmed.
'Falcon One, cameras on,' added Hal.
'Cameras on,' Troy and Jenna said, almost in unison.
The recon payload that each F-16 carried included not just camera pods, but their AN/APY-77 and AN/ ASD- 83 pods, as well as AN/AKR-13 telemetry receivers and other equipment. Because each member of Falcon Force was surveying a separate path, there were no HARMs today. They each carried recon gear.
Troy glimpsed a few small boats — they came and went in a split second — and wondered if any of them were carrying weapons or contraband.
As usual, everything on the ground flashed by too quickly for any of the pilots to make out anything useful.
It was up to the interpreters who plowed through the data the pilots were collecting.
'Dammit,' the other pilots heard Jenna say.
'Falcon Two, whazzup?' Hal asked, more than a trace of concern in his voice.
'Damned AKR-13 went FUBAR on me just as I came over Dhuladhiya,' Jenna said.
The island of Dhuladhiya was one of the key islands on her recon track, and a screwed-up telemetry receiver meant incomplete coverage.
'Falcon Three breaking left,' Troy said. 'I'm only about ten clicks off. I can be there in half a minute.' 'What about your track?' Jenna asked.
'I can bounce over and bounce back,' Troy said. 'Thanks,' Jenna said.
'General Harris thanks you,' Hal added.
Troy banked hard, heading north toward Dhuladhiya.
This will make them feel special, he thought to himself, to get buzzed by two American jets from two directions in one day.
The large island lay like all the others, flat and dust-colored, a few boats clustered around an inlet on one side.
