The Disciple

But right in front of her the leader was pulling Gs, turning hard, trying to get his nose around toward her.

At a push of a switch, the missile designated for the leader came alive, locking on. She pulled the trigger, and it left in a flash of fire. She turned hard into the wingman, who was proceeding straight ahead, obviously not into the fight.

The safe thing to do was to just zap him, but maybe he wasn’t a real threat.

Even as that thought went through her mind, she saw the flash as the Sidewinder she had fired impacted the leader.

Chicago O’Hare rolled down and into the wingman, pulling smoothly right up to five Gs, and kept going until her nose was vertical, pointed straight down. Only then did she ease off on the G. Her burners were still lit, so the airspeed built quickly.

Then the clouds surrounded her and she came out of burner and off the throttle and began pulling for all she was worth. Passing fifteen thousand, six Gs. ALQ-199 flashing green. Now that Iranian was trying for a radar lock, but it wasn’t happening for him.

She pumped off some flares from her chaff box, just in case the guy behind her triggered a heat-seeking missile into the clouds, and kept the G on until her nose was back to the horizon. She was down to four thousand feet, still in the clouds.

Weren’t there some mountains on this coast?

She pulled hard and rocketed back up toward ten thousand. There she stabilized and began an eighty-degree turn toward the coast.

As the coast went under her nose she broke out of the clouds, which seemed to be dissipating. No Iranians in sight. She came out of burner, checked her fuel, turned on her transponder and called Black Eagle on an encrypted frequency.

“I need Texaco,” she said. “Send him toward me.”

“And where are you?”

She gave the controller her position. He didn’t say a word.

After a last look behind her, she pulled off a glove and used it to wipe the perspiration from her face. Too bad about that MiG, but…

“Black Eagle, War Ace Three Oh One. Did they find my playmate?”

The helo pilot had Harry Lampert pop another smoke so he could see the wind direction and get a good idea of its velocity as he made his approach. Lampert lowered his helmet visor to keep spray raised by rotor wash out of his eyes. The pilot circled to approach him into the wind, then came into a hover over him. The horse collar was already in the water.

Lampert grabbed for it and fell out of his raft. He managed to get the thing around him and give a thumbs-up to the man in the door. He felt himself being pulled out of the water. The rhythmic pounding of the rotor wash reminded him that he was completely alive.

The winch raised him up beside the helo’s door; then the operator grabbed his parachute harness with both hands, pulled him in and relayed that to the pilot on the ICS.

“We have him,” the pilot told the controller in the E-2 Hawkeye, and she relayed the news to Chicago O’Hare in War Ace 301.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Three days after the F/A-18 Hornet crashed in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a

Ahmadinejad entertained his audience with an account of how this airplane had illegally and provocatively penetrated Iranian airspace and been intercepted. After a short air battle, he said, it was shot down.

“Where is the pilot?” one of the international reporters shouted, and was ignored.

Other pieces of the plane were produced, a half dozen, with the largest being the tail hook. It took four men to carry it into the room. The shank of the hook was slightly bent, and the whole thing was dirty.

The president regaled the reporters for another twenty minutes with some aerial fiction, and then he turned serious. “This airplane was obviously in Iranian airspace to spy upon the Islamic Republic.” He continued in this vein. Its presence was a serious breach of international law, and the government of Iran expected an abject and humble apology from the Great Satan.

The story shot around the world at the speed of light. In Washington a Pentagon spokesperson told the press that the matter was under investigation. She added, “If there has been an inadvertent penetration of Iranian airspace, of course we will apologize. However, until the investigation is complete, I am unable to say what the facts are. I seriously doubt that anyone intended to violate the sovereignty of Iran. We are querying the USS United States battle group commander. We will have an a

At Naval Air Station Oceana, the home of VFA-196, the pilots’ spouses and significant others had already been notified that the squadron had lost a plane and the pilot was safe. Press inquiries were rebuffed by the Oceana public affairs office.

In Tehran, the chargé, Eliza Marie Ortiz, trooped over to the Foreign Ministry and offered an official apology for the inadvertent violation of Irani an airspace and requested that the wreckage of the U.S. Navy plane found in Iran be returned to the U.S. authorities. The request, which was in writing, was taken under advisement.

The Iranian government showed the document to the press, but the story died anyway. The Iranians had some airplane pieces and a far-fetched tale of how they got them. No living pilot or dead body was produced. The U.S. Navy wasn’t talking. The public went on to other things. After all, the news from the Middle East was always bad.

Two days later Janos Ilin, of the Russian SVR, stood in the desert looking at the Hornet’s wreckage from a distance of about fifty feet. He was certainly no expert on airplane crashes, but this one looked remarkably intact. It seemed to have struck the ground in a flat attitude, skipped and plowed along shedding bits and pieces, then went up a little hill and got airborne again. On the other side of the hill the nose hit hard, almost crushing it; then the thing turned ninety degrees and skidded sideways to a stop. The remains of the crushed belly tank could just be seen about two hundred yards away.

Two of the men Ilin had brought with him did indeed specialize in the examination of crashed planes, and they began poking and prodding the wreck as the Iranians conducted their own examination. There were a dozen or more Iranian air force technicians, armed with a variety of tools and test equipment. The workers were supervised by at least a half dozen officers, who conferred, moved to another portion of the wreck and conferred again.

Habib Sultani and his nephew Ghasem stood beside Ilin, watching the entire evolution.

The most obvious thing about the plane was the shattered canopy and the missing ejection seat. The next thing Ilin noticed was that there were no bullet or ca

He turned so he could look back up the path the airplane had plowed as it decelerated, a path that pointed almost straight east. Not a trace of fire.

The airplane didn’t burn.

He looked at the wings. One of them had been nearly wrenched away from the fuselage and was bent at an angle.

There was no fuel in the plane when it crashed.

Ilin sighed and got out his cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep drag. The smoke from the cigarette zipped away on the stiff breeze.