Top Gun (3 page)

Gold nodded. “But you’re saying that you can’t get the brass interested in the Stiletto?” It was a sobering thought. Unlike
many engineer types who couldn’t get beyond their narrow specialties, Don had business savvy, the ability to comprehend the
big picture. If Don couldn’t sell the Stiletto, something was seriously wrong.

“I’ve got to be honest with you.” Don shrugged. “The military aviation division of this company lost a good deal of its luster
due to the Super BroadSword mess. Then came Herman’s retirement, and then his death. I’m doing all I can, but I’ve made my
mark in the commercial aviation side of the business. Those military procurement types don’t hear me, but they’d listen to
you.
You’ve got a fighter pilot’s reputation, and the contacts in the military to get the Stiletto a fair shake.”

Gold stood up and went to the wall of windows behind Don’s desk. The office was located on the executive/administration building’s
top floor, and had a view of the company’s airfields filled with rows of finished GC-9 series jetliners awaiting delivery
to their respective airlines.

Pop sure would have liked to see those fields filled up with fighters.
Gold thought. He turned away from the windows. “I’d like to help, but I really don’t know how it would work out between us.
There’s no denying that we’ve had our ups and downs through the years.”

Don swiveled around in his chair. “I hope you don’t think I still harbor a grudge concerning you and Linda?”

I don’t know. Do you?
Gold thought, going back in his mind to how the long-simmering feud between them had begun on that fateful summer morning
back in 1952, when Steve, home on leave, had run into an old flame, a pretty little brunette of a newspaper reporter by the
name of Linda Forrester, sunning her bikinied curves on the beach at Malibu. The two had gone directly from that beach to
Linda’s bed, which was where Don had found them when he’d come calling later that day. It was only after the fact—way too
late to make amends—that Steve had found out that Linda was Don’s fiancée.

“Steve, I got over that incident concerning Linda twenty years ago, the day I fell in love with your sister,” Don assured.
“As a matter of fact, I ran into Linda just last month at a commercial-aviation conference in Chicago. “ He paused. “Did you
know she quit her television correspondent’s job on the network to write full-time? That she’s working on a book about the
airline industry?”

“Yeah, I heard,” Gold muttered, wondering why it still bothered him to talk about Linda. They’d gone together for a while
after she’d broken up with Don, but eventually things became strained: Linda wanted to settle down and raise a family. Gold
was wedded to the Air Force. It was all in the past….

“Anyway, when I saw Linda, it was just like seeing an old acquaintance,” Don continued. “Nothing more, nothing less, and that’s
the truth.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Gold said wryly. “I’d hate to think you’re two-timing my sister.”

Don laughed. “If I feel anything toward you concerning Linda, it’s gratitude. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have married
the
real
girl of my dreams: your sister, Susan.”

“It’s not just that,” Gold murmured, growing serious. “There’re other differences between us.”

“Sure there are,” Don agreed. “But on the whole, I’d say that we’ve become more friends than enemies…?”

“That’s an accurate assessement.” Gold nodded. “But—”

“But nothing,” Don cut him off. “Look, I didn’t want to get into this, but I see it’s necessary, so let’s call a spade a spade.
The truth is you’ve never been able to come to terms with your own anger and resentment concerning your father’s affection
toward me.”

Gold flinched. It was true that Pop quickly came to rely on Don as a sounding board as well as a creative source, much as
he had relied on Teddy. Thinking about it now. Gold could feel the old emotions he’d struggled to keep tamped down rising
up in him, filling him with bitter rage.
It’s yesterday’s news,
he told himself, trying to rein in his temper.
Water under the bridge.
He told Don, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Come on, dammit!” Don said roughly. “You brought this crap up, not me. So now the least you can do is be man enough to admit
that you’re jealous of my relationship with Herman. You always have been!”

“You egghead son of a bitch!” Gold exploded. “How do you
expect
me to feel?
You
were the son my father always wanted, not
me!”
He stopped, taken aback by the way Don was smiling at him. “What’s so fucking funny?”

“Nothing, everything.” Don’s amused expression turned wistful. “I guess it’s funny how reality plays tricks on us. If only
you could have heard the way your father talked about you. If only you could have realized how proud he was of his son, the
fighter ace.”

Gold found his anger had vanished, leaving him hollow and hurting inside. “I tried as hard as I could to be who he wanted
me to be,” he said softly. “And I think that toward the end we both realized how much we loved each other….” He had to pause,
his throat grown tight. “But I was never able to fulfill his expectations.”

“Fulfill them now,” Don said urgently. “Your father wanted the Stiletto to redeem GAT’s reputation for building fighters.
Help me make his last wish a reality.”

Gold turned back to the windows, gazing out past the jetliner fleet glinting in the sun, to the immutable, tawny California
hills beyond the high, barbed-wire fence. The offer was tempting, no doubt about it. He and Pop had unfinished business; this
might be the way to make peace between them.

“Don,” Gold began. “I don’t think I could take orders from you.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Don got up out of his chair to come stand behind Gold. “We each have our areas of expertise. I know
how to design and build airplanes. From all your years spent working for General Simon in Air Force Procurement, I believe
you know how to market them.”

“A team, huh?” Steve mused. “Kind of like a pair of fighters flying a swallowtail pattern, watching each other’s backs?”

Don nodded. “You understand the term ‘synergy’?”

“The whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts?”

“Close enough,” Don responded. “What I’m suggesting to you is a synergistic partnership. We can work out the financial details
and who gets what title later. The bottom line is that I’m hoping that us two working together can approximate more than the
sum of our parts: in other words, one Herman Gold.”

“Not a chance,” Gold said. “When they made my father, they broke the mold.”

“I think so too,” Don replied warmly. “But with Herman gone, we’re the best that GAT has got.” Don paused, looking hopeful.

“So what do you say? It sure would make a dynamite splash at the stockholders’ meeting this summer if I could announce that
you’re coming aboard.”

“This summer,” Steve said doubtfully. “That’s not much time.”

Don answered, “We’ve got no time to waste if we want to keep your father’s dream alive.”

Gold turned to see Don Harrison holding out his hand to him. “Can I have a big office like this?” Gold joked.

“Bigger!” Don promised.

“A pretty secretary?”

“We’ll raid Hollywood.”

“Ah well, then, what the hell,” Gold said, shaking hands with his brother-in-law. “I’m tired of wearing Air Force blue.”

Don laughed happily. “Welcome, partner. I’ve got a very good tailor I can recommend to you.”

(One)

In the skies over Germany, near Sembach Air
Base

14 June, 1973

United States Air Force Captain Robert Blaize Greene banked his F-12B Sun-Wolf through the woolly cloud bank, breaking through
into an extended vista of sky so blue it hurt his eyes. Greene was on routine combat air patrol above the green and brown
checkerboard landscape of the Rheinland-Pfalz farmland region of Germany, near the French Border. His Sun-Wolf, the latest
variant of the venerable workhorse air-superiority fighter of the Vietnam War, was part of the armada of American combat aircraft
assigned to NATO’s offensive and defensive air operations over central Europe. The F-12B was a huge, wide-bodied rear-fuselage
warbird, with dual, square, engine-air intakes, sharply tapered wings, and twin, wide-spaced, vertical tail fins. She was
powered by a pair of brutish, augmented turbofans capable, during optimum conditions, of moving the Sun-Wolf at Mach 2.5,
more than two and a half times the speed of sound.

A voice crackled in Captain Greene’s helmet. “Lonestar, this is Mother Hen. Do you read? Over.” It was the familiar voice
of Air Force Lieutenant Buzz Blaisdale, a fellow pilot and close friend who today was acting as Greene’s air controller.

Greene pressed the radio call button on his throttle. “Mother Hen, this is Lonestar.” Greene’s mustache tickled beneath the
close-fitting rubber oxygen mask, and there was a slight echo of his own words in his radio earphones as he spoke. “Am cruising
in my patrol sector at 25,000 feet.” He glanced at his airspeed indicator. “Speed 475 knots. Nothing to report.” He twisted
his head, taking advantage of the excellent visibility afforded by the Sun-Wolf’s teardrop canopy to study the sky, and then
sharply dipped his wings to view the cloud-swept, variegated terrain streaking by below. “Doesn’t seem to be anything but
cows, and guys in lederhosen around here, or maybe a blond milk mädchen in leather shorts. I should be so lucky….”

“Listen up, Lonestar.” Mother Hen sounded concerned. “AWAC has just picked up multiple bogies traveling low toward your sector
at a head-on intercept with you….”

“Mama Bird.” Greene chuckled. “You sure your Air-born Warning and Control System boys haven’t locked onto a wolf pack of Porsches
truckin’ down the autobahn or something?”

“Negative.”

“Come on, Birdy,” Greene teased. “It’s happened before, and you know it.”

“Repeat, negative. These are bona fides, Lonestar.”

“IFF/NIS status?” Greene asked, becoming all business now.

“Working.”

Greene waited for the Identification Friend or Foe and NATO Identification System linkups of black boxes to go through their
electronic challenges and counterchallenges with the unknown airplanes’ transponders in order to identify the bogies as either
NATO good guys or Warsaw Pact undesirables.

“Mama Bird, just in case, how ’bout some backup?”

“Negative, Lonestar. We got bogies popping up in all sectors. Looks like World War Three from where I’m sitting.”

“Uh-huh. How’s that IFF evaluation coming along?”

“Just in, Lonestar. You got trouble, all right. Definitely bad guys. Forward Radar Air Patrol identifies them as a trio of
Fishbed-Js.”

“Fabbbulous,”
Greene said sarcastically, although he knew it could have been much worse, considering that it was going to be three against
one. A Fishbed-J was just a later variant of the rather outdated MiG-21, which Greene had dealt with over Vietnam. These Fishbeds
carried a 23
MM
cannon pack and—hopefully—nothing more lethal than a pair of short-range, heat-seeking Atoll missiles, the Soviet version
of the Sidewinder.

Greene’s Sun-Wolf was armed with a 20
MM
cannon mounted in the right wing root, a pair of Sparrow medium-range, radar-guided AAMs nestled under the fuselage chin,
and a quartet of short-range, heat-seeking Sidewinders riding the outerwing pylons.

“Lonestar. Your bogies are still coming at you head-on. “Estimate intercept in…” There was a pause. “… one minute.”

“Roger, Mother Hen,” Greene muttered. He glanced at his rectangular, glowing green radar display mounted high on the Sun-Wolf’s
instrument panel, to the left of the Heads Up Display control board. “I’ve got them on my scope now. Three bogies, flying
low but climbing. You copy?”

“Affirmative, Lonestar. Time to slip a round under the hammer.”

“Arming weapons systems,” Greene replied, flipping the toggle switch in the upper right-hand corner of the armament control
panel. “Master arm on.” He set his HUD display to short-range AA missile mode. HUD superimposed on his windshield a bright-green
computer-generated graphic that displayed vital information—airspeed, altitude, flight-path ladder, etcetera—and aided in
target acquisition.

“Lonestar, we’ve got those bogies coming at you now from less than twenty miles! Do you read?”

“Roger, Mother Hen,” Greene drawled absently, his attention focused on the HUD view through his canopy, although he also regularly
scanned the Sun-Wolf’s thirty-four dials and eighty-five control inputs. The F-12’s control panel was ghost gray with matte-black
insets. The dials and controls themselves were white on black, here and there interspersed with garish yellow-and-black bumblebee-striped
emergency controls. There were still more batteries of switches, buttons, and knobs bristling the control consoles on both
sides of Greene’s tan and gray chair.

“Lonestar, you are cleared to lock on and use your medium-range Sparrows!”

“Negative.”

Mother Hen sounded appalled. “But the book says your only chance in a situation like this is to score a couple of long-range
kills, before the Fishbeds are close enough to use their Atolls!”

“Negative,” Greene repeated. “The book don’t fly war-birds. People do.”

“But the computer gives you only a thirty-three-percent probability of survival in a knife fight—”

“A one out of three chance is better than the alternative,” Greene lightly responded. “You know as well as I do that a SARH
utilization would be suicidal in a situation like this.”

The medium-range Sparrow AA missile used a Semi-Active Radar Homing system that required the fighter pilot to continually
illuminate the target with his nose radar during the missile’s duration of flight. This was realistic in a one-on-one confrontation
when the pilot could lock onto his adversary’s tail, but self-defeating when flying head-on at multiple targets. “Mother Hen,
you know that to guide home a SARH I’ve got to keep flying straight at those bogies. By the time the Sparrow hits, I’ll be
close enough for the bogies to let loose with their heat-seeking Atolls. I’ll score a kill, but so will they, on me.”