by T. E. Cruise
Steve looked out past his BroadSword’s gleaming, swept-back starboard wing, and saw the tiny black cross on the airstrip’s ready line begin to crawl forward. He clicked his throat mike. “Chase Two, this is Chase Leader. Mayfly is taking off. Come on home, Chase Two. It’s time to go to work.”
There was a crackle of static from the earphones built into Steve’s helmet, and then, “Roger, Chase Leader. This is Chase Two. I’m coming around.”
Steve swiveled his head beneath the BroadSword’s teardrop canopy until he saw Chase Two—the F-90 being piloted by Captain Chet “Lowball” Boskins—glinting in the sunlight as it made its sweeping turn back toward Whetstone.
“Say there, Lieutenant Colonel, sir,” Boskins began in his easygoing Texas drawl. “Since I’m a Mayfly pilot in training, and technically no longer in the Air Force, do I still have to take orders from you?”
“I happen to be the highest-ranking Air Force pilot at Whetstone,” Steve joked.
“You’re also the only Air Force pilot,” Boskins radioed back.
Steve laughed. It was true. The other Air Force personnel were either aircraft maintenance or aero-medicine specialists. Everyone else was either CIA, and that now included the Mayfly pilots, or GAT personnel—instructors or technicians—here to qualify the men that Steve had recruited to fly the Mayfly spy plane.
“Would you pokey little BroadSwords mind getting out of my way?” the Mayfly’s pilot, Lieutenant Mel Evans, cut in. “I happen to be in a real airplane, here, and I’ve got places to go.”
Steve banked his BroadSword to starboard in order to give the matte black, high altitude reconnaissance jet plenty of sky as it soared past on its incredibly long, thin, glider plane’s wings. “I’ve seen it a few times already,” Steve confided to Boskins, “but I still can’t get used to the way that blackbird can climb.”
“Affirmative,” Boskins replied. “I’ll never forget my first Mayfly flight. I left the ground and she acted like she wanted to go straight up. You’ve got to experience it to believe it.”
Not much chance of that, Steve thought. The CIA was very careful about who it allowed to drive its brand new toys.
For the last eighteen months Steve had been traveling across the country and around the world, visiting SAC air bases to chase down leads concerning likely pilot recruits. Once the Air Force and CIA gave him the okay on a particular guy, Steve would meet with him, explain about the problem the U.S. was having monitoring the Russians, and then pitch the Mayfly program. If the pilot was interested—and most of them were; these men were patriots—the Air Force gave him temporary leave from his present assignment to undergo a battery of psychological and physical tests to certify his fitness for the job. Those pilots who passed were then released from the military, with the promise that they’d be reinstated with no time lost for promotion or retirement, and given financially lucrative, two-year contracts with the CIA.
Next stop for the accepted pilots was Whetstone, for a lengthy and difficult course in Mayfly driving. The spy plane’s outstanding abilities also made her a fragile and temperamental bird, quick to punish those who did not treat her with a full measure of respect.
Steve moved his BroadSword into position on the Mayfly’s starboard wing while Boskins put his BroadSword on the spy plane’s port side. The slender black bird was climbing fast, heading toward California. The two F-90s kept escort as long as they could, but within minutes the Mayfly was effortlessly climbing past 47,000 feet, operational ceiling for the BroadSwords.
“Blackbird, we are running out of sky,” Steve radioed to the Mayfly pilot.
“Affirmative, Chase team,” Lieutenant Evans called. “You boys get downstairs before you get yourselves nosebleeds. I got some flying to do …”
Steve watched Evans’s albatross-winged, black dagger of an airplane climb ever higher, dwindling away until the Mayfly’s tail pipe was a distant glowing speck; a twinkling star in the desert sky.
“She’s gone for about six hours,” Boskins said.
“It must be something to fly so high you can almost reach out and touch the stars,” Steve murmured. The Mayfly could carry its pilot to seventy thousand feet: higher than any man had gone before. As a matter of fact, the opportunity to break altitude records was one of the selling points Steve had used in persuading some of the Air Force’s top pilots to sign on as Mayfly driver.
“Say, Steve,” Boskins began as he maneuvered his Broad-Sword into position on Steve’s wing. “You flew a Broad-Sword in Korea—?”
“Affirmative.”
“She was supposed to be one hell of a dogfighter in MIG Alley,” Boskins continued.
“Well, I’m a little prejudiced, considering that she’s GAT-built, but in my opinion she had her moments …”
“I sure would like the chance to see what she can do,” Boskins said hopefully. “I’ve always felt like I missed out on the real fun, getting stuck flying ground support in a Shooting Star in Korea …”
Steve knew that the soft-spoken Texas jet jockey had earned his nickname because of his penchant for bringing in his F-80 low, and staying low, to more effectively bomb and strafe the North Koreans off the face of the earth. During his combat tours Lowball Boskins had proven that he had the guts to concentrate on the dangerous task at hand, steadily driving his airplane where he was told to drive it, and keeping it there until he was satisfied that he’d done his job. He’d been one of the first pilots Steve had recruited for the Mayfly program.
“I’d think a slow mover like this BroadSword would be boring to a hotshot, F-404 Starscythe jockey like yourself,” Steve mused. Boskins had been stationed in Germany in a TAC fighter squadron, helping to keep a wary eye on the Red Bear, when Steve had looked him up.
“The F-404 is fast, all right,” Boskins replied. “But the BroadSword is legendary for what it can do in a furball mixup. I’ve always had a hankering to see what I could do with her…”
Steve looked around. The clear blue sky was empty of traffic, and below them there was nothing but miles of parched desert. “Tell you what, Captain. I don’t see any harm in us burning up some kerosene playing tag.”
“Just what I wanted to hear,” Boskins exclaimed joyously. At that instant he popped his speed brakes, dropping back onto Steve’s tail. “Ah, Lieutenant Colonel, sir? Don’t look now, but you got one bad ass pilot on your six o’clock—”
Not for long, Steve thought. He cobbed his throttle and his BroadSword pulled away. Steve watched in his rearview mirror as Boskins began closing fast on his stern, and then Steve broke right, across his attacker’s nose. Taken by surprise, Boskins began to overshoot. As Boskins followed Steve’s turn in order to try and regain his position, Steve barrel-rolled. Boskins overshot, and Steve dropped down onto Boskins’s tail.
Steve clicked his throat mike. “Rat-tat-tat, ole buddy. You’re taking hits.” Of course his BroadSword had no guns, or even a gun sight, but Steve had flown enough combat missions in F-90s to know when he was within kill range.
“Fuck!” Steve heard Boskins swear. Boskins began jinking his F-90, trying to throw off Steve’s imaginary aim, and then dropped down into a steep dive toward the desert floor.
Steve stayed glued to Boskins’s six o’clock, but as he followed Boskins down he was mindful of his altimeter unwinding. Fun was fun, but he didn’t want Boskins getting carried away and drilling a hole in some cactus down there …
He needn’t have worried. At fifteen thousand feet Boskins abruptly pulled up, causing Steve to shoot past as he hurried to come out of his own dive. Now Boskins was behind him, and likely licking his chops as he closed on Steve’s tail: It wasn’t a bad maneuver, just a basic and easily stymied one.
Boskins was about to drop down on his tail when Steve flipped the switch on his throttle, extending his own speed brakes. His BroadSword shuddered as it reared up in the sky. Boskins flashed past. Steve clicked the switch again and hauled in his brakes. He cobbed the throttle and once again settled down nicely onto
Boskins’s six o’clock.
“Rat-tat-tat, ole buddy.”
“You keep saying that,” Boskins muttered.
For the next ten minutes Boskins must have tried everything he knew—which wasn’t much—and none of it worked. That didn’t make Steve feel good; it worried him. He knew that Boskins was one of the Air Force’s best fighter jocks, but Lowball had been trained in combat tactics well after the Korean War. Steve knew the current theory fresh from the think tanks of the desk jockeys who made the rules: Guns on fighters were obsolete. Today’s Mach-two interceptors would engage the enemy over enormous distances—perhaps even out of visual range—blowing him out of the sky with radar-controlled air-to-air missiles. Let the machines do the work, the desk jockeys were saying. Let the pilot come along for the ride, if you must, but put blinders on his eyes to keep him glued to his ghostly green radar screens, and certainly don’t waste the money we could use to buy more computers by taking the time to teach him aerobatics …
“I quit,” Boskins said dejectedly, slowing down and coming around to head back toward Whetstone.
“Roger,” Steve replied, relinquishing his six o’clock to pull alongside Boskins, who was staying very quiet. Steve could imagine how bad the guy was feeling. “Hey, buddy. Don’t take it so hard.”
“I couldn’t break away from you once …”
“Don’t forget I’ve logged hundreds of combat hours in this bird,” Steve said. He thought, And while you were in college, I was learning how to maneuver, not punch buttons on some computer.
“I’m going to be hearing rat-tat-tat in my fucking sleep,” Boskins sighed.
“And I’ve heard the real thing,” Steve reminded him softly. “And that makes a difference. Anyway, think how badly you would have waxed me if we’d been flying Star-scythes.”
“Yeah! That’s right!” Boskins brightened. “Once I got a radar lock on you it would have been bye-bye, Lieutenant Colonel …”
Maybe, but then again, maybe not, Steve thought. At least he’d managed to salvage a little of Boskins’s self-respect. The one vital piece of equipment the Air Force hadn’t yet figured out how to take away from a fighter jock was his ego …
(Two)
Whetstone
24 May 1957
Steve stood in the motor pool’s doorway, waiting for the kid to bring around the Jeep he had requested. It was high noon; the thermometer mounted on the doorjamb read one hundred degrees, but Steve was willing to wager that the parched air inside the motor pool’s corrugated steel building was far hotter than that.
Steve was wearing a USAF, rescue crew/test pilot issue, Indian orange, cotton flight suit, low-heeled black cowboy boots, and an Air Force flight satin baseball cap in blue, on which he wore his silver oak leaf. While he waited for his jeep he glanced again at the creased scrap of paper Captain Chet Boskins had left for him in his mailbox at the compound’s Administration/Communication hut:
Urgently request that you meet me at the cave/1200 hours Steve, please be there!!!
—Lowball
Here it was already a little after noon, and it was going to take another ten minutes to drive to the cave, Steve brooded as he pondered the note’s urgent, almost panicked tone. He wondered what was wrong? It wasn’t like Lowball to lose it…
A Jeep came around the corner, pulling up in front of the motor pool. A young, blond, freckle-faced airman with a badly sunburned pug nose put the jeep in neutral, set the parking brake, and hopped out, leaving the engine running.
“Sorry for the delay, sir.” He gestured over his shoulder toward the Jeep. “It took some doing to find her.”
“No problem,” Steve lied, thinking that it wasn’t this kid’s fault the compound was short on vehicles, or that Steve didn’t have a Jeep personally assigned to him. He wasn’t permanently stationed at Whetstone. He’d been there only a few weeks, and would be back in Washington in a few more days.
As Steve settled into the driver’s seat he noticed that there was no key in the ignition. “Airman?”
The kid saw him looking at the tangle of wires drooping down from beneath the metal dashboard, and smiled apologetically. “Actually, sir, I couldn’t find an available vehicle, so I kind of borrowed this one from Mister Cooper.”
“Kind of borrowed,” Steve repeated slowly. “From Mister Cooper …” Cooper was the CIA station chief at Whetstone.
“Yes, sir.”
Steve was glad that he was wearing wire-rimmed aviator sunglasses with dark green lenses: They helped him to keep a straight face. “What you’re telling me is that you hot-wired this?”
The airman nodded. “Just leave it running when you get to where you’re going, sir, unless you know how to start her up without the key?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t admit it, son …”
The young airman had difficulty stifling his own grin. “I filled her up, so you won’t have any worry about running out of gas.” He paused. “Begging your pardon, sir, do you think you might be able to return Mister Cooper’s Jeep by, say fourteen hundred hours? That way I could put her back before he notices it’s missing.”
“I understand,” Steve said. “For the record, Air Force personnel do not steal vehicles. Off the record, I appreciate what you’ve done.”
This kid had gone out on a limb for him. Whetstone was officially a CIA operation, which meant the spooks had authority over the Air Force noncom personnel.
“I’ll be back in plenty of time,” Steve added, releasing the brake and putting the Jeep in gear. “If by any chance I’m not, as far as you’re concerned, I never asked you for a Jeep.”
“Thank you, sir,” the kid said, looking relieved.
“Thank you, son.”
Steve drove away from the compound’s scattered clusterings of tents, trailers, and hangars, passing the airstrip where a matte black Mayfly was parked on the ready line. The spy plane looked dismal and dispirited with its long, thin, drooping wings propped up by wheeled struts to keep them out of the dirt, but as Steve had seen, once the Mayfly was airborne and those struts were jettisoned, the black bird could really limber up.
Steve had made this trip to Whetstone because he’d wanted the men he’d recruited to know that he took a personal interest in them, but being near the West Coast had also allowed him to squeeze in a week at the end of April to take his nephew camping in the Santa Ana Mountains. Steve was grateful for that time with Robbie. The camping trip almost hadn’t come off. Back in March, Steve’s sister had called to warn him to expect some blowback from Don on the subject. During that conversation she’d asked again why Steve and Don were so frosty with each other, and again, Steve had ducked the question. What could he say? The reason your husband hates me is because he caught me screwing his girl, the one he really wanted to marry.
When Steve had first heard about Susan’s intention to marry Don he’d briefly considered coming clean with her, thinking that she ought to know what she was getting into, bringing the guy into the family. At the last moment he’d decided to butt out, figuring that everybody had the right to privacy about his past. Thinking back on it, Steve was glad that he’d kept his mouth shut. When he’d visited the Harrisons in April the couple had seemed deliriously happy with each other, and with Suzy’s pregnancy. Their baby was due the third week in January.
Steve was really glad that he hadn’t let that snafu concerning Linda Forrester spoil things for Don and Suzy. Especially now that Linda was ancient history for everyone involved …
The Jeep rattled and creaked as Steve steered around the worst potholes and rocks in the narrow, jutted road. The terrain resembled Death Valley: sparse vegetation in a dusty, arid land the leached out colors of dried blood and polished bone. There was a hot wind picking up. As Steve drove he hunched down, turning up his collar, grateful for his flight suit’s long sleeves and trouser legs. The windblown swirling grit rasped unprotected skin, drawing blood like atmospheric sandpaper.
He reached the switchback turnoff for the cave
. The steep, twisty, gravel-strewn incline up the butte was more a goatpath than a road, but the Jeep had all wheel drive. As he dropped the transmission into low and began the climb, scrub lining both sides of the road scraped against the Jeep’s wheels and fenders. He kept glimpsing scurrying movement just ahead of his front tires among the rust-colored rocks and low, thorny bramble. He tried his best to ignore the slitherings and creepings. This was snake country, but Steve didn’t mind reptiles; he’d seen his share of them during his tours of duty in the tropics. Snakes were no big deal, but back at Whetstone they had been having some trouble with tarantulas invading the compound at night. He did not at all care for those big, hairy mothers, striped like tigers, with a leg span as wide as a man’s outstretched fingers. Nobody at Whetstone wanted to go near the fuckers once it was discovered that they could jump six feet in any direction, including right into your face, so the recommended procedure was to use the bugs for target practice. This drove the CIA spooks crazy because the only firearms on the compound were their ridiculously expensive, custom-built, silenced, long-barreled .22 caliber pistols that the pilots swiped out of the Mayfly survival kits.
Steve slowed down as he approached the cave entrance set in a jumble of the rock about twenty feet above a wide spot in the roadway. As Steve pulled up he thought he was too late because he didn’t see another Jeep, but then he saw Chet Boskins beckoning to him from the cave’s shadowy entrance.
Boskins was a slightly built, wiry twenty-seven-year-old, with short-cut, light brown hair and blue eyes. He was wearing sunglasses and a tan cotton baseball cap, a white T-shirt, and baggy, silver khaki fatigue trousers, with double-snap, bellows-type pockets, tucked into black, lace-up hiking boots. Around his waist was a canvas web belt from which dangled a pair of canteens, a sheathed survival knife, and a flapped pouch.
Steve, mindful of the engine’s hot-wired ignition, left the Jeep’s motor running, and set the parking brake. He did know how to restart the Jeep if he had to, but why bother? It had a heavy-duty cooling system so it wouldn’t overheat. Because he was parked on a slight incline and couldn’t use the transmission to hold the Jeep in place, he wedged a couple of good-size rocks behind the rear tires, and then made the easy climb up to the mouth of the cave.