Didn't Lab Rat warn you about that? When are you going to quit thinking with your little head?' 'There's nothing going on with her,' I said hotly. Partly because it was true, and partly because it pissed me off that there wasn't. Anna had given every indication that there could be, and I was a little annoyed that the current circumstances ? like being inside Russia, for God's sake ? prevented me from following up on the clear signals she was giving off. The things a man has to do for his country.
'Besides, what about you and Brent?' I pitched my voice a little bit higher as I said his name, imitating her Minnesota accent. I've always been good at that, and it drives her up a wall.
'What, the career American diplomat?' she snapped. 'And just what could be suspicious about that?' 'Oh, nothing,' I said airily. 'He sure seems to be sucking up to you, though.'
'Sucking up? Since when do you care who I talk to?'
'And since when did you become my own personal hall monitor?' I demanded.
That settled it for a while. The yellow shirt gave me the signal to taxi, and I let off the brakes and jammed the throttles forward, not caring if it jolted her in the backseat. After all, she'd agreed on one thing ? I got to drive, not her.
Sheila subsided into an angry muttering, but I could feel her movements in the back of the aircraft ? sharp, short, and staccato.
Clearly, she was pissed. That made me come to my senses a little.
'Listen, it's none of my business,' I said. 'Let's just forget about it and fly the mission, OK?'
'I will if you will,' she answered, a sweetly saccharine note in her voice. 'Just be careful about which stick you're grabbing up there, OK?'
'That was a shitty thing to say,' I snapped.
'Can dish it out but can't take it?'
I gave up my attempt to restore harmony in the cockpit. Regardless of how she pissed me off, Sheila was a pro. Let her deal with her own snit, as long as it didn't affect the mission. I took off well short of where I had the time before, rolling into the air with a sharp, crisp motion. I grinned, wondering whether Sheila or Tombstone would give me the most grief if I pulled a hot-shit approach when we came back in, waiting until the last minute to lower my landing gear. Sheila, probably, I decided. Based on Tombstone's earlier reaction on our first engagement with Illya, he'd probably find at least some public reason to claim it had all been part of the plan. I knew Sheila wouldn't let me off so easily.
We ascended to eleven thousand feet, circled for a moment, then at the signal headed off for the IP. The Tomcat was its normal, beautiful self, purring under my fingertips like ? hell, don't start thinking like that, I told myself. This was a Tomcat, not a cute little Russian agricultural spy.
I descended smoothly to six thousand feet, following Sheila's directions smartly, almost anticipating each command. The heads-up display was feeding me information from her plot, showing me when the turns were coming up. The radar detection envelopes of the imaginary SAM sites were painted in yellow on the display, indicating that they were all in normal search patterns. If and when the game controllers decided we were entering the fringe of a detection envelope, we might see the indicators turn red as they switched into a track mode.
'Down another one hundred feet,' Sheila ordered. 'Put a little bit more of the hill between us and the site.'
I complied immediately, nosing down even farther to the ground.
Now, this was more like it. No imaginary deck to come up and smack me in the face, just the sheer pleasure of flying low enough over the countryside to get a good look at it. Even at almost Mach One, you can make out the general details. It seems like you're going so much faster when you're this near to the earth.
Now, what I really like is flying nap of the earth, so close that you can almost reach out and touch the trees. The Tomcat, at least on the later variance, has excellent terrain-following radar that can keep you locked at practically any altitude near to the earth. The only thing you have to watch out for then is power lines and telephone poles, which can increase the pucker factor by the next order of magnitude during night bombing runs.
'Problems,' Sheila said. The yellow envelope of the easternmost SAM site turned red on my display at the same time. Her ALR-67 receiver beeped out its warning.
'I thought we were low enough,' I said.
'We are ? it shouldn't be getting us.' Sheila's voice was calm, a shade more terse than normally.
'Well, evidently it is,' I said. This is one of my great failings as a member of the team, my tendency to point out the obvious to someone who already knows it.
'You think I can't see that?' she snapped. 'Get down a little lower ? you comfortable with that?'
'Your wish is my command.' I nosed the Tomcat down, a gradual descent rather than a sharp one this close to the ground. Finally, at two thousand feet I steadied up. 'How's that?'
'It's still got us ? I can't figure it out ? wait! It's got to be there.' She clicked in a targeting symbol that was reflected immediately in my heads-up display. 'It's part of the game,' she explained rapidly.
'It's got to be ? an unbriefed SAM site, just to test our reactions.'
'Well, get me the hell out of here,' I said. 'I'm not carrying any HARMS.'
HARMs are specialized missiles that weren't part of our normal load out. Instead of being heat-seeking or IR, a HARM would home in on a hostile electronic emission and blow the hell out of the transmitter.
Sometimes it was just a soft kill, but a soft kill was good enough. You'd knock out the radar in a SAM site and the crew, if there were any left alive, would be reduced to manual targeting. It's a hell of a problem against a high-Mach aircraft.
'Hard right ? you see those hills ahead? Cut in between the two middle ones. I think that'll give us shielding, but we won't be in the envelope of the northernmost site.'
I complied, following her directions as quickly as she put them into the heads-up display processor. 'Will we get there on time?'
'I think so ? goose it a little bit, will you?'
Now that was impressive. I knew that in the backseat Sheila was quickly recalculating our inbound route, redoing the time-distance problem in her head without the assistance of the detailed planning charts she had earlier. But I had some degree of confidence ? if anybody could pull it off, she could.
'Back to two three zero,' she ordered.
Sure enough, as soon as I executed the last turn, the red fire-control radar signal subsided into a cautionary yellow. Nothing else lit up either, indicating we were clear of everyone's detection envelope. I breathed a sigh of relief. 'How far off are we, timewise?'
'About ten seconds. I think we can make it up.'
I eased the throttles forward a little more, exceeding our briefed speed. The terrain was still familiar, although I was seeing it from a different angle than we'd planned. Our computer-aided decisioning tools are really incredible these days. The bombing run simulator allows a pilot, in essence, to prefly a mission, maneuvering the computer screen with his joystick through the terrain surrounding the IP. You can program it to paint in SAM sites and detection envelopes too. Back on the Jefferson when we first briefed this mission, I spent a fair amount of time on the computer flying all around the briefed IP. I knew this alternate route pretty well, at least enough not to be confused by the change in terrain.
'Ten seconds,' Sheila warned. 'Descend to eight hundred feet.'
Now, this was more like it. We were skimming along now, still well clear of the forest and the low surrounding hills, but my sensation of speed increased dramatically.
'Five seconds.' I could see it now, just as it had been briefed the concrete bunker surrounded by a number of trucks, obviously old derelicts that they pressed into service for realistic training. I made a course correction, lining up solidly on the bunker.
'Two seconds,' she said.
I kept my finger poised over the weapon selections switch.
One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. I toggled off the bomb.
The Tomcat jolted upward as five hundred pounds of dumb steel left its wing, and I corrected immediately to maintain level flight. As the weapon peeled up, I jerked the Tomcat up hard, rolling away from and out to the side of the missile's lofted flight path. This close to the ground, it's important to put as much distance between you and the impact point as quickly as possible so that you don't get caught up in the shrapnel or blinded by the cloud from
