Cobra Strike (5 page)

“So half the pilots with us on the carrier are hoping you make a fool of yourself tonight.”

McGee laughed unconcernedly. “We got a few bucks riding on it too. Last I heard, it was three to one against me making a perfect
landing.”

“I take it the definition of ‘perfect’ is that you don’t smash us like insects into the steel deck.”

“Hell, no, it’s more skilled than that,” Glasseyes said, sounding offended. “There are four steel cables stretched across
the deck. If my tail hook catches the third, that’s perfect. Or the second, they can’t argue. If I catch the first wire, I
was coming in too low, and the fourth wire, I was coming in too high. Way too high, I just touch the deck with my wheels and
take off again.” They had already discussed what happened when the plane was much too low. That was class A. “You were asking
how fast this bird went,” Glasseyes continued. “Strange thing is that these supersonic planes do all their important things
at regular speeds— takeoff, landing, fighting. It’s only for getting to the scene fast, or getting the hell out fast, that
supersonic capability is useful. That was a mistake the Navy made with its first fast fighters. Everyone thought that the
day of the aerial dogfight was over, that now aircraft were only mobile missile launchers. So what happened was that during
the first part of the Vietnam war, the Navy was losing one plane for every two enemy aircraft downed. Compare that to the
Korean kill
ratio, which was seventeen to one, and to World War II, which was fifteen to one. We were down to two to one. So we re-equipped
the planes and developed a new pilot training philosophy, with the result that for the second half of the ‘Nam conflict the
Navy blew twelve MIGs out of the sky for every one of theirs downed.”

A stream of instructions came over the radio from the carrier. They were to fly in a holding pattern with the eleven other
planes, about twenty miles from the carrier. The planes were called in one by one. All of the first three aircraft aborted
their landings, one of them three times. They learned over the radio that the fourth plane in caught die fourth wire from
a high approach. Glasseyes and Mike were fifth.

“Look out for the meatball on the port side of the carrier,” McGee told Campbell. “If I’m coming in at the right level, we’ll
see it as a yellow light. Too low, it will look red. Too high, green.”

McGee began his approach about ten miles from the carrier’s position, at 1,200 feet. Mike noticed that he flew by instruments
alone, never once peering anxiously ahead for a sign of the carrier’s lights, as Mike was doing.

Bill, the LSO, was talking Glasseyes in over the radio hookup. Three miles out, McGee began his descent. With less than a
mile to go, he looked up from his instruments for the first time and checked to make sure that he was lined up with the drop
lights at the aft of the carrier.

Mike stared at the meatball, which shone yellow. He wondered momentarily if it was in working order, since he had never seen
even a flicker of red or green. Now was not the time to distract the pilot with thoughts like that.

Bill called him down, the wheels touched the deck, and McGee applied full power as he waited for his tail hook to make a trap
on a wire. The jolt of the aircraft suddenly hooked at more than 100 m.p.h. pitching them forward and then backward into their
seats. Mike heard the declining scream of the engines as Glasseyes cut down the power. They were home.

“Third wire!” McGee announced proudly. “I’m in the money!”

*   *   *

It was a few minutes before midnight when McGee’s Tomcat touched down on the carrier. By chance, at this exact moment, a few
minutes before eight A.M. on a cold, wet morning in western Lancashire, an old friend of Mike’s, who had accompanied him on
many missions, was also busy with a jet fighter. He lay shivering in the long, wet grass, under a low, cloudy sky, at the
perimeter of an airfield. If they tested the plane today for ground observation, it would have to be at relatively low altitude
because of the low cloud ceiling, which would be ideal for him to get good video footage of maneuvers. He had his bird book
and binoculars and had taken the precaution of using a few feet of tape on a lark rising up out of the grass, so that if he
was apprehended before he actually filmed the plane, he could claim that he was an ornithologist doing a study of the larks
of northern England and that he had just wandered in through a hole in the fence, which, of course, he had not made himself.
He could claim no knowledge of anything secret going on in the big red hangar on the other side of the airfield.

Andre Verdoux had been in Warton for a week now, living quietly in a bed-and-breakfast place on a side street. The landlady
was a nice-looking widow in her late forties, six or seven years younger than himself, and she developed a great curiosity
about his comings and goings. Apparently Warton was not accustomed to visits by French bird-watchers. At least, he was the
first one she had seen hereabouts, or so she said. Andre did what was expected of a Frenchman in these parts, and now she
visited him in his room every night for a few hours. Besides relieving his frustrations and passing the time very pleasantly,
their romantic sessions kept her mouth sealed. When anyone asked what the Frenchman was up to, she responded vaguely, as if
he were so insignificant and uninteresting that such a question had never occurred to her. Andre felt he could lie low here
for as long as he had to without being discovered. The only problem was that he did not have much time. Results were needed
back in France without delay.

This aircraft deal was going to be a big source of rivalry
between France and Britain, much bigger than the Thomson-Plessy communications network rivalry. That was worth maybe $5 billion,
while the aircraft could be worth $30 billion and even more. Thomson in France and Plessy in Britain were competing to see
which would be the one to supply the Pentagon with a supersophisticated battlefield communications system. With this network
a soldier on reconnaissance can draw a map of enemy positions and insert it in a slot of equipment in his jeep. A coded, digital
version of this map passes through several mobile radiotelephone exchanges and in seconds is reproduced at HQ miles distant.
At the same time dozens of direct-dial messages are coming in from officers in the field, along with other teleprinter messages,
which are automatically graded according to urgency. The HQ commander has constantly updated data supplied to him, such as
ammo and fuel expenditure and supply. For the first time ever in warfare the commander would know what the hell was happening!

But that was chicken feed in comparison to the aircraft deal. The Euro-fighter could expect a thousand orders worth $15 billion
from Western Europe’s air forces, plus another fifteen hundred orders from other countries. What made this fighter special
was that it would be an unstable aircraft; that is, one that could not fly according to the laws of aerodynamics. The plane
would fly by wire, which meant that its wing and tail flaps and its engine thrust would be totally controlled by computer-guided
instruments that would make constant rapid readjustments to prevent the craft from breaking up.

The advantages of such a fighter would be enormous. An ordinary stable aircraft is designed to fly in a straight line and
has to be forced to climb, dive, or bank. But an unstable fighter would have no steady flight path and could jump in almost
any direction with incredible speed, thus outmaneuvering a more conventional aircraft.

British Aerospace, a government-owned firm, and Avions Marcel Dassault, the maker of the Mirage and controlled by the French
government, were bitter rivals to see who could come up with the Euro-fighter first and grab all the orders. Needless to say,
Andre was working for the French. And
for a very fat fee. It was pure and simple greed that urged him to take these videotapes by himself; he didn’t want to share
with others if he didn’t have to. What he was required to do sounded simple enough. The British were testing an unstable aircraft
at Warton in Lancashire. Still photos were of no interest since this was a regular British fighter, a Jaguar, destabilized
by fattening its wings and adding half a ton of lead in its tail. What the French wanted was either film or videotape of a
number of key maneuvers made by this unstable plane.

So Andre got. himself a light video camera and a bird book. What had gone wrong during the past week had been nothing he had
foreseen. He was a lousy cameraman. He could not keep the speeding, crazily wobbling aircraft in the viewfinder. Everything
he had shot so far was valueless because the aircraft kept jumping out of sight in each sequence. Either today would work
because the low cloud ceiling would keep the plane in a more restricted area so it could be observed by experts on the ground,
or Andre would abandon his solo effort, undo the purse strings, and hire a professional cameraman and a group of men to spirit
him around and protect him. If it came to that, Andre would call Mike Campbell and let him put a team together. This would
be a change from their usual type of mission, hopefully a bloodless effort and more an espionage stunt than a paramilitary
mission. Andre guessed Mike would welcome the challenge of something different. He knew Campbell well, having been on missions
with him everywhere from Angola to Vietnam to Nicaragua. Crawling around in the damp English grass just might be one of the
few things Mad Mike hadn’t ever done! But Andre wasn’t ready to split his fee yet. If things worked out this morning, he’d
get to keep everything for himself.

The door was being slid open in the big red high-security hangar across the airfield. Tiny figures in white coats or in brown
mechanics’ overalls moved around swiftly. In a few minutes a little yellow tractor would tow the aircraft out. Andre watched
intently from his hiding place in the long grass, ignoring a lark singing its little heart out a short distance away.

He also did not notice something else: two German shepherds bounding along inside the perimeter fence. The animals had sighted
him and were eagerly straining after him with little yelps of anticipation. As Verdoux peered through his binoculars at the
hangar door, his sharp hearing registered one of these yelps, which were changing now to more deep-throated growls as the
two animals neared their prey. He took the binoculars away from his face and glanced around him, listening. He saw the tan
fur of the two shepherds coming at him through the high grass. He jumped quickly to his feet with the lead dog no more than
fifteen yards away, its jaws agape, the lips peeled back from the long fangs.

Andre had no weapons or even anything that could be used as a weapon, except the wire cutters he had used on the fence. The
Frenchman was a cool, fast thinker in an emergency, but even he could think of no way to use a small pair of wire cutters
against a trained attack dog. He was wearing a heavy tweed jacket and a gabardine raincoat against the damp cold, and he merely
stood where he was, since it was way too late to reach the hole in the fence, waiting to meet the dogs with his left forearm
held horizontally before his face.

The lead shepherd took a flying leap at his throat from six feet away. Andre looked at the gaping jaws and glistening teeth,
heard the rumbling, savage growl of the beast, and thrust his left forearm between its jaws. He felt the dog’s teeth puncture
the sleeve of the gabardine raincoat, then pierce the heavy tweed and knife into the flesh of his arm. But it was only the
long canines that could penetrate this far, two on the dog’s upper jaw, two on its lower. Verdoux’s fright deadened the pain.

He looked into the crazed, bloodshot eyes of the dog, its jaws clamped tight on his left forearm, then brought down the edge
of his right hand in a sharp karate chop that caught the dog across its muzzle at a point midway between its snout and eyes.
The animal’s neck snapped, and it hung lifeless for a few moments, its teeth caught in his sleeve.

The second shepherd attacked around the body of the first one. The dog’s teeth sank into the side of Verdoux’s
raincoat. The animal held on to the coat and used its momentum to knock the man off-balance. When Andre fell, the shepherd
went for his throat.

He lay on his back while the big dog, forefeet on his chest, repeatedly took savage snaps at his throat. With his injured
left forearm under the dog’s chin Andre managed to force back its head for a moment. He used that instant to wrap his right
forearm over the top of the dog’s muzzle, covering the animal’s eyes in the process. His right hand grasped his left elbow,
and his left hand his right upper arm. He squeezed his forearms tighter together, the dog’s muzzle caught in between. Trained
to attack, the shepherd made no effort to withdraw its head from this tightening vise until it was too late—its jaws were
firmly clamped shut, and it could not extricate its muzzle from between the man’s forearms, no matter how hard it pressed
down with its paws on his chest and violently shrugged its shoulder muscles and shook its head. Andre lay on his back in the
long wet grass and held on.

He let the dog play itself out a bit and tire before he rolled on his right side and applied a scissor lock with his legs
just below the animal’s rib cage. The dog threshed in agony and died slowly under the constriction.

Winded, hands trembling, Andre Verdoux picked up his video camera, binoculars, and book. He left the two carcasses of the
dogs where they lay and this time did not wire up and conceal the hole in the fence after he had passed through. Now there
was no way he could conceal the fact that a breach of security had taken place. He examined the teeth punctures in his left
forearm as he went and discarded his shredded raincoat. He could be out of Warton in a half hour, and after he reached Liverpool,
he’d put in a call to Mike Campbell.

Baker, Winston, and Turner were four days into Afghanistan, four days of constant climbing, descending, picking their way
along rocky mountainside paths, weakened by the thin air of the high altitude, as wary and watchful as rabbits as they awaited
a sudden attack from the air, ready at a shout or signal to instantly throw themselves facedown on whatever they happened
to be walking on, be it snow or sharp-edged broken stones. First their minds had to accept these conditions, and now their
bodies were coming around slowly— getting hardened, leaner, toughened. They moved out at sunup and were constantly on the
move till sundown, when they lit a fire and made a stew of whatever was available, which they ate with flat cakes of unleavened
bread, their only food at times other than the evening meal. Each night they slept where they could and woke shivering from
cold before dawn. Yet all three of them were having a great time.