Typhoon Season

Hell, why deny it? Flying this thing was fun as hell. No, the Pitts wasn’t capable of crushing you into your seat hard enough to make you black out; couldn’t rip a hole in the fabric of the sound barrier; couldn’t fly with impunity in clouds or fog. On the other hand, it didn’t make you concentrate on a Heads-Up Display instead of the sky and ground; didn’t feed your hands and feet synthetic control surface pressures because a set of computers stood between you and the ailerons, rudder and elevator; didn’t have an E-2 Hawkeye peering over its shoulder all the time. There was just you, the pilot, all alone with a single propeller, a pair of wire-braced wings, and a solid blast of wind in the face.

Wonderful.

And there was no denying that this little bird could do things a Tomcat couldn’t. Rolling… hell, the Tomcat’s roll rate was terrific given the plane’s size and mass, but the Pitts could whip around twice in the time it took an F- 14 to make it through one full revolution. And landing a Pitts was as easy as stepping off a curb; nothing like the sweaty-palm work of dropping 72,000 pounds of Tomcat onto the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier.

Time to be meandering back to the field, though. His wife, Joyce — although he still thought of her as “Tomboy,” her call sign from her days as his RIO — would probably be waiting for him, and none too patiently. They were supposed to have dinner with his uncle, Admiral Thomas Magruder.

He sighed. Not that he didn’t enjoy his uncle’s company, but the conversation was certain to turn to politics and Pentagon infighting. God, he missed the straightforward banter of Tomcat drivers: clean traps, aerial maneuvers, missiles launched, bogeys splashed.

Thank God for the Pitts Special, and for a wife who knew her husband well enough to insist that he buy it. If it weren’t for those two things — and the stick time he still occasionally got in an F-14, of course — he didn’t think life would be bearable. During what the media called the Second Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d flown his last combat mission. He knew that. He’d never go up against a MIG again. For that matter, he’d even given up the command of Carrier Battle Group 14 for a billet in Washington. A promotion, supposedly.

But now… he was at loose ends. An advisor here, a consultant there. A guy standing around in the hallways of the Pentagon, looking for something to do. Waiting, he supposed, for a war.

It didn’t help that Tomboy’s assignment took her down to Pax River all the time, where she got to test fly the latest Navy aircraft while he sat around in stuffy meeting rooms.

Life just wasn’t fair.

But a smart man could make it fairer. Grinning again, he put the biplane’s nose down hard and listened to the wind’s shriek rise in the rigging as the surface of the ocean swooped up at him. Turned a couple of barrel rolls in the meantime. Too bad there was nobody to watch except the herons and ducks in the nature preserve a mile or so to the west.

Although he tried to resist, he pulled out of the dive too soon — another holdover from flying Tomcats, with their infinitely greater inertia. He’d have to pract —

He cringed as something shot underneath the Pitts with a whistling shriek. What the hell? That had sounded for all the world like a jet engine. The Pitts jolted through a disrupted airstream, then steadied. Looking down, Tombstone glimpsed a dark arrowhead shape racing just above the waves, then shooting upward. It rose vertically, trailing a faint string of vapor behind it. Against the pale glow of the eastern sky, it was shaped not like one arrowhead but two, joined in tandem. The impression he’d gotten during its close pass was that it was only a little longer than the Pitts — but far faster. As he watched, it arched over in the sky, then seemed to disappear. Finally he spotted it — a tiny dot, growing larger by the second. Coming straight at him.

In his career, Tombstone had flown against a wide variety of aerial weapons, including fighter planes, air-to- air missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and, once, an UAV — an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle that he’d pursued and shot down before it could deliver a nuclear warhead on Cuba. This thing didn’t resemble any of them.

Its intent, however, was unmistakable.

From this angle Tombstone couldn’t begin to judge its speed or trajectory. He had no RIO to feed him radar data, and no countermeasures to dazzle its radar or confuse its heat-seeking head — whatever it was using to track him.

So he used instinct instead, jamming the stick forward and firewalling the throttle. The Pitts dove as if fired straight down out of a cannon, jolting Tombstone into his shoulder harness.

The bogey missed again, but it seemed to Tombstone that it adjusted at the last second, almost clipping the Pitts’ tail. Whatever it was, if it carried a warhead the explosive wasn’t detonated by proximity; that was something. Tombstone hauled back on the stick, pulling the biplane out of its screaming dive. This time he was afraid he’d let it go too long, that he was going to strike the surface of the ocean at a speed that made water every bit as unyielding as concrete.

Then the crests of the waves were whipping past so close he was sure the biplane’s bulbous tires were getting wet. Tombstone kept the stick pulled back, but easier now, lest he lose all his airspeed. Now he really wished he was back in his Tomcat, with enough thrust to yank him quickly up where he could maneuver. The Tomcat might even be able to flat outrun this little bogey, whatever it was.

He swiveled his head back and forth, squinting against the setting sun, wishing he had Tomboy in the backseat to help. If there were a backseat. Meanwhile, the coolest part of his mind debated his options. Found them to be limited. He had no idea what he was up against. He was flying in an unarmed plane. A propeller-driven plane. An unfamiliar propeller-driven plane.

But he was a pilot, damn it — not just a pilot, a naval aviator. No one, and no thing, was better in the air.

He spotted the bogey again, zipping in from the rear, and he executed a left turn so sudden and violent it stalled the inside wings. As he dropped the nose to restore airspeed and circumvent a spin, he heard the whistle of an oncoming jet turbine growing shriller, and pulled his head down into his shoulders instinctively… then the sound faded again. He straightened the Pitts out and let it dive slightly, building up airspeed.

Meanwhile, the cold part of his mind was steadily examining impressions and making decisions. The bogey was obviously not manned; it was much too small and made turns that would black out any human pilot. On the other hand, it was not an ordinary missile. Which left only two choices: a Remotely-Piloted Vehicle, or a UAV like the one he’d shot down over Cuba. If the former, then someone was flying it by joystick from a distant location, using an onboard video or infrared camera for guidance. If the latter, then the bogey was a fire-and-forget weapon, with an onboard navigation computer guiding it to its destination.

He immediately discounted that option; all the UAVs he’d ever heard of, including the one he’d shot down, found their destinations through a combination of ground-mapping radar and Global Positioning Satellite navigation. They were programmed to locate and strike at stationary targets; they couldn’t dogfight. So: This was an RPV.

Not that the information helped him much right now. All it meant was that the pilot of this bogey could turn, accelerate and climb his vehicle at the limits of the plane’s capabilities, not his own.

Limits…

Tombstone suddenly remembered the BD5-J, a stubby homebuilt jet even shorter than the bogey. He’d watched them fly at air shows, and spoken to their pilots. Although fast and agile as hummingbirds, the little jets had strictly limited ranges due to greedy engines and minute fuel tanks. The bogey that was chasing him around had to be subject to the same restrictions. Given enough time, it would simply die of starvation.

But how much time was enough? Trying to drain the bogey meant juking and jiving for as long as it took. But every maneuver would have to be a miracle of timing. Too slow, and the bogey wouldn’t be fooled. Too fast, and the bogey would simply reacquire. Either way, the result would be the same.

All this went through his head in the time it took the bogey to complete a quick half circle and come back at him again. This time Tombstone noticed the round maw of an air intake, mounted in a depression atop the vehicle. If it weren’t for that black circle, the damned thing wouldn’t be visible at all from this angle.

He kept his eyes on the circle, timing its approach, making himself wait… wait…

Too long! He knew it even as he slammed the Pitts through an ugly maneuver that was half barrel roll, half loop. Holding his breath, he thought about Tomboy and waited for the impact.

But then the bogey was past him, slanting off toward the shore. Too startled to recover from his maneuver, he stared through the tunnel formed by his spinning windscreen. The bogey began to turn again, but this time without the relentless certainty he’d come to fear. In seemed to settle into a lazy arc. Perhaps it was running out of fuel.