The First Billion

Relax, he told himself. You were born to do this. Born to fly.

The words set him on a slingshot journey back through time in which he reviewed his every accomplishment as a pilot. Baghdad. Tonopah. Colorado Springs. The images shot past his mind's eye with increasing speed, faster and faster, one on top of the other, blurred, ill-focused, until just as quickly they froze and he saw himself at age fifteen, lying on the hood of his father's Chevy on a hot summer night in Texas. The car was a hot rod, a fire engine red '68 Camaro with a 454 engine, twin chrome exhausts, and a white racing stripe painted down the hood. After spending all afternoon washing and waxing it, he'd driven twenty miles outside of town and parked in the middle of the open plain where alone in the gathering dusk, he could watch the jets from Beeville Air Station, fifty miles to the north, screech across the sky. He would lie there for an hour, looking up at their gleaming silver bodies, listening to their engines shake the very pillars of the sky, dreaming upon the white contrails they left behind. He was born to fly. It had come to him with a certainty that was raw and cold and frightening. Shivering in the ninety-nine-degree dusk, he'd known he belonged up there.

So, fly, he told himself now. Relax and fly, goddamn it.

He gazed at the countryside below. The sun had fallen below the horizon, and its waning rays burnt the Earth's cusp a flaming ochre. The sky above was dark and supple and inviting.

Gavallan's eyes fell to the radar array, a square black screen six inches by six inches located on the instrument console. The screen was dark except for his own orange blip and a flashing triangle that was a passenger jet ninety miles to the north. He'd been flying for an hour, and so far he had detected no sign of Russian air patrols. Either Grushkin was a man of his word or Russian air defenses were perilously lax.

Checking his coordinates on the heads-up satellite navigation system, he put the plane into a seventy-degree roll and brought his heading to west-southwest. Doing some quick math, he figured he'd put the bird down at Ramstein Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt at around 10 P.M. local time. From then on, they'd be living on the good graces of others.

Five minutes passed. Gavallan checked his coordinates against a map on his knee and decided he was somewhere just south of Kraców, Poland, safely out of Russian airspace. "We're going to start looking mighty suspicious to our flyboys anytime now," he said to Cate. "Time to call ahead and give the boys in blue our arrival time." He checked his radio log and dialed in Ramstein Air Force Base, home to the 86th Airlift Wing. As he keyed the mike a second time, a steady howl sounded outside his earphones. At the same time, a red square blinked on his console. Fire. Starboard engine. His eyes kicked right. The gauge showing the exhaust gas temperature was maxed out, full in the red. He pulled the handle to activate the fire extinguisher and cut fuel flow to the engine. At the same time, he cut back on the throttle, shut down the engine, and put the plane into a steep dive. A check over his shoulder revealed nothing. But the gauge didn't lie.

The plane shuddered, as if hit from the side.

"Jett!"

"Hold on, sweetheart, just a little problem."

"What is it?"

Gavallan's heart was racing; a lump lodged high in his throat. The stick was bucking in his hand. He jerked it to the right, but there was no response. A high-pitched buzz saw whined in his earphones. He was losing control of the aircraft.

This isn't my plane, he protested silently. I haven't trained in a Mig. A second check over his shoulder showed flames licking the wing. Immediately he hit the auxiliary extinguisher, and a gust of white puffed from beneath the wing. The flames flickered, then disappeared.

And then the world turned upside down on him. The Mig rolled over and went nose down, spi

"Jett, help us. Stop this. Oh, God… no, no!"

Gavallan looked at Cate, her eyes wide with terror, her helmet pi

A voice inside him whispered, You were born to fly. So, relax and fly.

"Just a little glitch," he said, in the voice Grafton Byrnes had taught him that hot and su

Still inverted, he pulled back on the stick, depressed the ailerons to stop the spin, and pulled the nose through. Gently he goosed the port engine. The single turbine hummed confidently. It was working. The plane was responding to his touch. He was guiding the aircraft instead of allowing it to guide him. A well of confidence grew in his chest, warm and reassuring. It was the pilot's bravado coming back. The certainty he could do anything, if by sheer force of will alone.

And there, as he plummeted toward the earth at four hundred miles an hour, a dam burst in his mind. A clarity of thought, of memory, of action, came to him that he had not possessed for years.

Priority One. Ring One.

The words struck him like a lightning bolt.

The attack on Abu Ghurayb. Saddam's Presidential palace.

He saw himself in the cockpit of the F-117- no, damn it, he is there… the stick between his legs, the joystick to his left, the infrared display screens. He is there. Inside Darling Lil, ten thousand feet above the Iraqi desert.

He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles a switch. Bomb armed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. His finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red lights fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the pickle and the weapons bay door opens. Darling Lil shudders. He depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. He feels the aircraft jerk upward, as if freed from its moorings.

As the bomb falls, his eyes lock onto the IR screen and the delicate crosshairs positioned over the east wing of the Presidential palace. All external stimuli disappear. He is in a tu

"Thunder three-six. Red Leader One. Copy?"

The bomb appears on the screen. A lethal black dot skimming across the ground at an impossible speed. A red light blinks. A fuel warning. Tanks low. Gavallan pays it no mind. It will wait.

"Roger Red One. Come in."

"Friendlies in the area. We have friendlies on-site. Abort run. I repeat: Abort run."

At the sound of the word "friendlies," Gavallan's finger is already moving, skewing the crosshairs away from the palace, guiding the "smart bomb" away from the American troops.

On the console, a second light blinks- yellow, urgent. It is the Allied Forces Locator warning him he has engaged friendly forces.

"Abort run! Confirm, Thunder three-six!"

But the pilot's instincts have beaten the verbal command by a second, maybe two. An eternity in the electronic world that can be translated into two hundred fifty feet of fall time.

Gavallan keeps his thumb pressed to the right, ordering the bomb to follow his instructions. But the bomb does not listen. She has been on her downward trajectory too long and it is as if she is too stubborn to alter her course.

The desert flower blossoms. The IR screen blanches. A blizzard of white noise. The palace reappears. The east wing is no more, a bonfire of angles fallen in on itself. The heat signatures have disappeared, too, replaced by the blotchy, pulsing quasars that indicate fire.

Inside the Mig, Gavallan lets the images fade away. He has seen enough. In an instant, the past has vanished. But it is a different past than the one he has known. A different reality than the one he has lived with these eleven years. No longer will he question his response, second-guess his reflexes. He knows now that he did everything he could, more even, to prevent the bomb from injuring American Marines. Governed by his instincts, he ordered the bomb off its course even before he himself had fully received the command. If his actions were not sufficient to save the lives of ten men, to prevent two others from being robbed of their ability to live full and decent lives, they were still all he could demand of himself. He was an accessory, yes, and for that he would always feel horror and revulsion. But he would no longer feel the guilt, the shame, the dishonor, no longer believe that it was his own poor reactions that had caused those tragic events.