Brown, Dale - Independent 04 (52 page)

 
          
“Roger,”
Humphrey acknowledged. “Clearing to the left wing.”

 
          
“Copy,
642, clear to the tanker’s left wing.” As Humphrey moved away from the boom,
the boom operator said, “641, cleared to the contact position, One-Five ready.”

 
          
“641,
moving in . . .”

 
          
“Taking
fuel, 641, no leaks”

 
          
Mundy
was doing pretty well this time—in fact, he was so steady, and concentrating so
hard on staying that way, that a new problem cropped up: autokinesis. The green
“forward/aft” director light suddenly seemed to move, not up and down along the
row of director lights, but in a slow clockwise spiral. Mundy knew what it
was—a form of spatial disorientation when a stationary point of light would
appear to move by itself, following tiny movements of the eyeballs. He tried
hard not to follow the light, but there was no way of stopping the slight,
almost subconscious commands to go to the flight controls.

 
          
“641,
stabilize . . . down four .. .”

 
          
It
was no use—the spinning was getting worse by the second. Mundy hit the disconnect
button just as the director light hit the aft limit: “641, disconnect...”

 
          
“641,
breakaway, breakaway, breakaway
/” the
boom operator shouted on the radio. Mundy’s reaction was automatic: throttle to
idle, nose down, positive rate of descent. He glanced up and saw the boom
operator’s observation window just a few scant feet away—he had come just a few
milliseconds from hitting the tanker. The tanker pilot had cobbed his four
throttles to military power and hauled back on the stick at the “breakaway”
call, and they had still avoided hitting each other by less than a yard.

 
          
Get on the instruments,
Mundy commanded
himself. The sudden deceleration was causing his head to spin downwards, making
him pull the F-16’s nose up, but he knew it would cause a collision if he let
that happen. He choked back the overwhelming sensation of tumbling and spinning
and focused on the attitude indicator, forcing it to stay at wings level and 5
degrees nose down. He saw the altimeter spinning downwards and applied a little
power to level off. “641 is clear, One-Five,” he radioed. Mundy took his hands
off the control stick momentarily, felt around his right instrument panel, and
flipped on all the exterior lights.

 
          
“I’ve
got a visual on you, 641,” the boom operator said. “Our next turn is coming up.
Do you have a visual on us?” “I’ve got a pretty good case of the leans,” Mundy
said, still staring at the attitude indicator but finally getting enough
stability back to glance at the heads-up display and other indicators. “I’ll
stay straight and level at the bottom of the block. Make your turn in the
anchor. 642, come join on me after you’ve made the turn. I’ll let
Liberty
know what’s going on.” He pressed the mike
button aft to the SECURE UHF position: “Control, 641 flight is rejoining, two
in the green, about eleven apiece.”

 
          
“Copy,
641,” the weapons controller aboard the AW ACS radar plane responded. “641
flight, vector heading one-six- zero, your bogey is at one hundred bull’s-eye
low, speed three-twenty, ID only, report tied on.”

 
          
“641
flight copies, check.”

 
          
“Two,”
Humphrey replied.

 
          
“641
turning right,” Mundy radioed. His case of the leans was just about cleared up,
but his congestion was as bad as ever and probably getting worse. The shit was
starting to pile up, he warned himself... “642, I’m at zero-two- zero for
seventy-five bull’s-eye at angels seventeen.”

 
          
“Tallyho.”
Humphrey had visual contact on him, so Mundy pushed the throttle up to military
power, got on his vector heading, and started his pursuit. Humphrey would catch
up as he could, and report when he was back in formation with his leader.

 
          
With
a closure rate of almost a thousand miles per hour, the intercept did not take
long. Mundy’s radar found a lone blip on the screen about seventy miles from
the
New Jersey
coast. Mundy used the radar cursor control
on the throttle quadrant to move the cursor on the radar return, then hit his
designate target
button on his control
stick and received an audio
lock
in
his headphones and a
lock
indication
on his heads-up display. He then hit the
iff
interrogate
button on his control stick, and a row of code letters appeared
on his radarscope, ix
2X 3X 4X
cx,
which meant that the target he had locked on to was transmitting no air traffic
control signals. With wackos like Cazaux flying around, this was definitely a
hostile act, not to mention a really stupid thing to do—if I had an IFF or
radio malfunction at night, Mundy thought, I wouldn’t fly anywhere near U.S.
airspace these days.

 
          
“Control,
641, radar contact,
twelve o’clock
, thirty miles low, no paint.”

 
          
“That’s
your bogey,” the weapons controller confirmed, “641 flight, check noses cold,
ID only.”

 
          
Mundy
checked the weapons status readouts on his left multifunction display. He
carried two AIM-120 Ram radar- guided missiles and four AIM-9P Sidewinder
heat-seeking missiles, plus two hundred rounds of ammunition for the gun and
two external fuel tanks. Right now he had no weapons selected, none armed. “641
confirms nose cold for the ID pass, check.”

 
          
“Two,”
Humphrey responded. He was supposed to do a complete weapons status check and
report, but, Mundy thought as he tried to clear his head and ears, for now the
less said on the radios, the better.

 
          
The
last ten miles to the intercept turn passed very quickly. The bogey was
screaming now, almost four hundred miles an hour, and he had descended to
barely three thousand feet above the ocean. This was not a smuggler or a
terrorist—this guy appeared on a military attack profile! Mundy remembered that
the Cuban drug smugglers . stopped by the Hammerheads a few years earlier had
used military aircraft to deliver drugs—maybe Cazaux had turned to military
aircraft as well. That thought didn’t cheer Mundy up one bit.

 
          
Well,
it was time to see what the story was. At fifteen miles distance, high and
slightly to the left of the unknown aircraft’s nose, Mundy started a tight left
turn and a rapid descent. He was passing twelve thousand feet on his way to
four thousand ...

 
          
...
when suddenly a red-hot jab of pain spiked through his sinuses like a knife
driven into his head, threatening to blow out his eyeballs. Mundy’s vision and
hearing both disappeared in the incredible pain, and his entire face seemed to
creak and pop like a slowly collapsing building. Mundy knew what it was, and he
was fully expecting it—what he had not been expecting was the enormous amount
of pain it caused. With a head cold and sinus infection, the rapid climb during
takeoff forced mucus tightly into the Eustachian tubes of Mundy’s inner ear,
reducing the air pressure inside the sinuses and inner ear and jamming the
sinuses and inner ear closed. As the ambient air pressure increased during the
rapid descent, the outside air rushed in and tried to fill the partial vacuum
in the inner ear and sinuses. The few extra pounds of air pressure on the
delicate sinus membrane and eardrums caused intense pain. Mundy tried rolling
his head, tried a Valsalva maneuver, tried swallowing, but the pain only
continued. He dropped his mask and tried to squirt more nasal spray into his
impacted sinuses.

 
          
Suddenly,
the pressure in his left ear went away, followed shortly by relief in his right
ear, and he could see his instruments again as most of the pain washed away.
But as he felt a warm trickle of fluid running down his neck, he knew the
relief wasn’t because of the nasal spray—it was because he had just ruptured
both eardrums. He had to turn the radio volume up all the way to hear it. Mundy
ran his finger up into his helmet’s earcups to scoop out sticky blobs of blood,
but it didn’t help much.

 
          
Somehow,
through all that, he managed to stay on the bogey, and now Mundy and Humphrey
were closing in within three miles of the unknown aircraft. It had no exterior
lights on—another sign of a hostile. As he moved closer, Mundy could start to
make out its shape and size— commercial, not military, at least no military
aircraft Mundy was familiar with. “Control, 641 flight, I have visual contact
on a commercial aircraft, two engines, possibly three engines, aft-mounted. No
exterior lights, no interior lights visible from the windows. It appears to be
a Hawker or Gulfstream-class bizjet. Activating ID light.” Mundy could barely
hear himself talking through the radio, like listening to a conversation going
on in another room. The pain in his head was tolerable, but now his loss of
hearing and an occasional bout of the spins and the leans made it difficult to
concentrate.

 
          
“Copy,
641.”

 
          
If
the AW ACS weapon controller responded, Mundy didn’t hear him, but he went
ahead anyway. By the time he had moved within one mile of the bandit—he had
stopped considering him just an “unknown” and now thought of the aircraft as a
“hostile”—they were over the coast of New Jersey just north of Sea Isle City,
heading northwest. They had climbed slightly, to about four thousand feet, but
were still traveling about six miles per minute. The bright lights of the
Philadelphia
metropolitan area were dazzling on the
horizon, only fifty miles away.

 
          
“Control,
641 has a visual ID on a Falcon- or Learjet-se- ries twin-engine turbojet
aircraft, tail number November- 114 Charlie Mike. Color appears silver or gray
over dark blue. Still no exterior lights. No visible external weapons, no open
doors. Moving forward. Acknowledge.” Mundy heard a faint “Clear, 641,” from the
AW ACS controller, so he activated his ID searchlight on the left side of his
F-16 ADF fighter and started forward, maneuvering the agile fighter so the
searchlight trained along the right side of the bandit’s fuselage and across
the row of windows.

 
          
Mundy
reached a point where the searchlight was shining inside the right side of the
bandit’s cockpit, then switched his VHF radio to 121.5, the international GUARD
frequency, and said, “Unidentified bizjet-Nl 14CM, this is the United States
Air Force fighter off your right side. You are in violation of emergency
federal air regulations. You are hereby ordered to decrease speed, turn left
immediately to a heading of one-seven-zero direct to the Sea Isle City VOR, and
lower your landing gear. Respond on 121.5 immediately. Over.”

 
          
“Welcome,
Air Force F-16,” came the response. “This is Barry Kendall of the TV news
program ‘Whispers.’ I’m speaking to you on the international aviation emergency
frequency. Can you hear me? How are you tonight?” The Gulfstream’s exterior
lights popped on, and its airspeed began to decrease. “Can you tell us your
name, please, and where you’re from?”

 
          
“November-114CM,
you are in deep shit.” Mundy had to restrain himself from coming completely
unglued at this point. He recognized the TV show, of course, one of a series of
trashy “tabloid TV” shows that liked to bring cameras into the most unlikely
places to videotape people in compromising positions. Why the hell they’d risk
their lives to pull this stunt, Mundy couldn’t figure. “I mean, 114CM, you are
in serious violation. If you proceed any farther you may be fired upon without
warning. Turn left immediately towards Sea Isle City VOR and prepare for ah
approach and landing at Atlantic City International. Over.” .

 
          
“Air
Force pilot, this is Barry, we’re live right now on national TV, and about
twenty million viewers are watching this intercept. I must say, it took you
boys longer than I expected to find us. Did you have us on radar the whole
time, watching us, or did it take some time to track us down?” Mundy was going
to repeat his warning, but the bastard continued, “Now that you have us
identified, my cockpit crew is going to reactivate our flight plan and we’ll
proceed up the coast to our destination at
Newark
Airport
. We’re going to switch off the low-light
camera and take some footage with the regular camera. Thanks for your
cooperation, guys.” At that, a blinding beam of light stabbed out from the
bizjef s cockpit, aimed right at Mundy.