Wingman (6 page)

The planes streaked overhead, and pulled up as one, staying in formation, and angling up 80-degrees. The after-noise hit as did the wash from the low-flying jets.

Hunter felt the wind and the smoke and exhaust mixed with the spray kicked off the ocean from the powerful machines hit him right in the face. It felt beautiful.

He looked at Jones. The older man's smile hadn't dulled an iota. "Dawn flight,"

he said, producing a new cigar and ritually spitting off the end, "That was our Air Patrol."

The planes peeled off and, in sequence, began their landing approach. Five minutes later the fighters were taxiing up to a hangar where Hunter and the general were waiting.

The canopies opened, a ground crew appeared and placed a ladder beneath each cockpit of the still whining jets. The first three pilots to emerge Hunter had never seen before. And he didn't recognize the other two until they were down from their planes and had removed their flight helmets. Suddenly he realized he was looking at two smiling, familiar faces.

Captain J. T. Toomey. Lieutenant Ben Wa. Two pilots from the old Thunderbirds team.

It was good to see them. They had performed together for a year before the war and had been tight-just like all of the T-Bird teams over the years. Then they went to war together. Never did Hunter think he'd see them again. But here they were.

"Hey, flyboy," J. T. "Socket" Toomey started off. "What do you think, that the world stops turning because you go off and live on some mountain like a yogi?" Toomey was the designated Mister Cool of the group. He was ruggedly handsome, with a face that looked like an ad for an aftershave.

Ben Wa, the crazy hula-hula boy from Maui, gave a deep, solemn bow. When he was made a member of the team, people scoffed that the Air Force was including him as a token Oriental. That was before these people had seen him fly. Wa let his wings do the talking.

"Good to see you, Hawk," the diminutive Wa said, smiting. "Can't do any tricks without The Wingman."

"I only see five planes," Hunter countered, with a laugh. "What am I going to fly?" At that moment, he would have flown the Piper Cub.

Toomey and Wa looked at the general.

Jones only smiled. Relighting his cigar, he motioned to the group to grab Hunter and lead him toward the back of the hangar. Even members of the ground crew had stopped attending to the jets and followed the group of pilots to the last bay in the building.

It was covered floor to ceiling with a white drop cloth. The only thing Hunter could see inside the shroud was the glare of two powerful lights, throwing weird shadows around the inside of the structure.

Without fanfare or suspense, Jones drew the curtain back and revealed what was behind.

Hunter felt a lump immediately form in his throat.

Sitting before him was the most beautiful F-16 ever built.

It was his old airplane-the F-16 he had flown when he was a member of the Air Force Aerial Demonstration Squadron, as the Thunderbirds were officially called. He had last seen it just before reporting for his NASA shuttle training.

It was painted in the traditional colors of the Thunderbirds. Its snout was wrapped in red, white and blue stripes, as were the tips of its wings. The tail section had a webbed design of blue bordering four large stars and eleven smaller ones on a field of white. Centered on the tail was the unit's symbol-an American Indian-style drawing of the mythical Thunderbird, a circle on its breast which contained a white star. Inside the white star were the silhouettes of four jets.

The jet looked to be in excellent condition-he could tell that it had just been recently overhauled, and given a fresh coat of paint. But for all its authenticity, the '16 still looked different to Hunter. Something was missing.

Then it hit him: All of the plane's Air Force markings had been removed.

"It's the 'law,' Hawk," Jones said, reading his thoughts again. "Like we were talking about, no references to the old days allowed."

"But I thought you said, no one cared about these bogus laws?" Hunter just felt the jet wasn't complete without its old markings.

"In this case, it can get mighty dangerous, real quick," Jones told him. "The New Order will pay any pilot one-hundred-thousand dollars in real silver for shooting down any plane flying with the old USAF markings. All they have to do is produce the evidence. That's a lot of money these days, and there are a lot of freelancers out there who would gun you down for it. Christ, the New Order would even pay an air pirate."

"Screw the New Order," Hunter spat out.

"Think you can still handle her?" Jones asked him, knowing the reply.

"I suppose I could give it a try," Hunter said, at that moment, the happiest he'd been in nearly three years.

Ten minutes later, he was taxiing down the runway.

The F-16 was a pilot's dream come true.

It was built light-nearly 80-percent of its frame was aluminum, and only

11-percent was the heavier steel. The designers wanted it that way-the lighter the better. The reason? Because they outfitted the thing with a kick-ass GE turbofan engine that could boot 27,000 pounds of thrust on demand. The combination made for a highly aerodynamically superior thrust-to-weight ratio. In other words, the engine thrust power was nearly twice the weight of the entire airplane. Throw in the forebody strakes for vortex control; a wing blended to the body for greater overall lift; a variable wing camber for automatic leading edge steering flaps; one hundred and fifty more examples of state-of-the-art aerodynamics and a dash of American ingenuity and what came out was simply the best maneuvering fighter plane ever built.

The cockpit was a video game come to life. It was crammed with science fiction-type avionics: a "heads-up display" which projected up on an invisible TV screen right in front of the pilot all of the critical control data needed to fly the plane. The pilot could keep an eye on the controls, know where he was going, know what his weapons status was and who he was shooting at-all without ever looking down at the control boards.

But the HUD capability was just the beginning. The plane carried its own video recorder and playback for mission analysis-everything done during a sortie could be recorded and brought back ready for broadcast. The video capability also allowed the pilot to pre-record mission elements for playback during his flight. Seeing this in the cockpit, Hunter had to wonder whether anyone had TVs anymore. The F-16 had an autopilot that could do just about everything an average human pilot could-some claimed more. But it took more than an average person to understand the alphabet soup of subsystems inside the plane's cockpit: INS, TACAN, TF, IFF/ SIF, AAI, ILS, JMC, JVC, ADF UHF, BIT, DMT, ENG, PROG, TGT, HSI, and on and on. It was at once brilliant and bewildering. To the casual observer-and way back when to the uninformed Senate appropriations committee member-the cockpit looked impossibly confused, as if a mad scientist had had a hand in its design. Some pilots believed that was accurate.

The plane was completely "fly-by-wire;" its flight control system was fully electronic. Unlike other planes, the control stick was not between the pilot's legs.

Rather it was off to his right side. By using the stick, the pilot had at his fingertips his weapon release, display control, engine trim switch and gun trigger.

The side-stick controller always gave Hunter the feeling that he was flying the plane from an armchair-in fact the F-16 had a recliner seat, tilted upward by 27 degrees.

Both were essential to flying such an advanced supersonic fighter and that the F-16

was. Wide open-at "full military"-it could haul ass at nearly three times the speed of sound.

Of course, Hunter knew the reason to fly that fast and accurately was to get where you're going and shoot at something once you got there. Again, the F-16 came out on top. It was a technological schizo. Whether its mission was to dogfight an enemy-a match it almost always won, thanks to its M-16 20mm rapid fire cannon and four air-to-air missiles-or blast him on the ground, the plane could do both, no problem. It could maneuver like a fighter but carry enough ordnance-conventional free-fall bombs, dispenser weapons, napalm, you name it-to be a bomber. And with the fire control system up on the "heads up display," with everything else, the pilot never had to take his eyes off the target. And with multiple accuracy, "track-while-scan" high-velocity search, and quick-reaction, fingertip weapons firing additions, the plane was quick on the draw. If the pilot launched an air-to-air missile, the opponent usually had only seconds to live. It was that simple. Challenged to a duel, the F-16 was unquestionably the quickest gun in the West.

If the mission was to bomb-tanks, troops or other airfields-then all the pilot would do is switch on the Doppler beam, sharpen the baby to 64:1, add the ground target indication/tracker and push the button. Anything targeted, moving or not, was instantly blown to smithereens.

And it was good on gas . . .

The F-16 was just under 50 feet long; its wingspan just a hair under 33. The tail rose 17 feet from the ground. It was deceptively small-a direct contradiction to the idea "bigger is better." In the world of the jet fighter, small is better. It means you're hard to detect, either on a radar scope or to the eye. Hard to see means hard to hit. Hard to hit extended a pilot's expectancy by a few minutes, or hours or even years. No wonder they all loved the '16.

The plane could climb, dive and turn on a dime-and pull 9gs while it was doing it. Even better yet, it could do it on a full tank-other planes in its class had a hard time doing 7gs and that was only possible with less than a full fuel load.

But a plane is only as good as its pilot. And Hunter was unquestionably the best.

So the F-16 fit him like a glove. A match made in heaven.

His favorite thing about the '16 was that no aircraft was quicker off the ground.

Unlike other jets, which required a ground crew to get them cranked up, the F-16 had an automatic starting system. Just like turning the key in a car, the engine would fire up and be capable of lifting off 51 seconds later. Also eliminated was the 20 minutes or more start-up time that pilots of other planes needed to program their onboard computer. The F-16's computers were churning in less than a minute. All the pilot had to do was pre-record the flight data onto a computer cartridge then load it into the aircraft's computer system. Jones, knowing his wingman would be anxious to get airborne, had already pre-recorded such a cartridge for Hunter.

So, because of the plane's quick reaction capability, Hunter was able to strap into the cockpit, have the plane towed out of the hangar and, just a few minutes later, be sitting at the end of the runway, giving his instruments the final check-over.

This would be a solo flight-like someone seeing an old lover for the first time in a while, Hunter wanted no company. It would be him and the bird alone. It was something his fellow Thunderbird pilots could understand.

He waited for clearance to take off. The base's control tower, in a far cry from its heyday, now only needed a single traffic controller, but he was still the only person who could give a pilot permission to take off. So Hunter waited.

His hands felt good on the controls again. The engine purred like a kitten. The plane had been obviously well-maintained. His thoughts went to the story Jones told him of how he managed to get it: The general had made a convoy run a year before and intentionally stopped at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas on the way back east. The place, once the homebase for the Thunderbirds, was now abandoned-and off limits-shut down by the New Order, Jones had set down there anyway, and saw nearly 100 planes lying destroyed on the runways, courtesy of the New Order fanatics. But this didn't prevent him from poking around. He happened upon one of the unit's old supply hangars, busted the lock off with a crowbar and when he swung the door open . . .

"There she was," he had said. "Sitting there like the day you left her. Why those clowns didn't bust her up like all the other planes on the base, we'll never know."

The next convoy west, Jones clandestinely hired a C-130 cargo plane out to Nellis, along with a ground crew, who, over the next several days, secretly took the plane apart, packed it and shipped it east. If they had been caught, it could have meant his losing his job at the least; execution by the New Order at the worst. But they didn't get caught.

And once Jones had the F-16, he knew it was time to lure Hunter out of retirement.

Suddenly, the radio crackled and a voice gave him the go-ahead to takeoff. He remembered Jones' only request. That was to stay away from the mainland. He didn't particularly want anyone-including his bosses-knowing that the unit had a sophisticated F-16 at the base, not right now anyway.

He scanned his instruments once more and took a deep breath and waited . . .

Then it came to him. "
The Feeling
." It was always there every time he took off.

He became disembodied. In a higher state of mind. The mechanics of flight became as simple as the wink of an eye. It was this instantaneous osmosis-which set him apart from other stick jockeys. It was indescribable. Other pilots strap in, do the checklist, prepare to take off. Fight the nervous energy that always creeps in. Hunter would melt into the machinery. His brain linked with the onboard computer. His hands and feet became extensions of the flaps and stabilizers. His eyes became the radar; his ears the radio.

Other pilots flew with their brains; Hunter flew with his heart. For him to fly an F-16-or any plane for that matter-was as easy and as natural as it was to walk. And that was what set him apart from the others. "The Feeling." It always came to him. It was there the first time his father let him take the controls of the Cessna when he was barely 11. He had never told a soul about it. He couldn't. It was beyond description. Yet, he always recognized it and let it wash through him. From that moment on, he
was
the plane.

Instantly, he lifted the air brakes and was moving forward, gathering speed. 100