by T. E. Cruise
I don’t want to be like Uncle Steve, Greene thought. I used to, but that was before he sold out, teaming up with my stepfather…
He said, “Begging the colonel’s pardon, but you’re reading too much into all this. I’m a fighter pilot, sir. That’s the beginning and end of the explanation of why I did what I did. Put me in a fast mover and I do what comes naturally, just like if you take a bird dog out into the field, that animal is going to point. Simple as that.”
Dougan, pondering Greene, nodded. He glanced at his wristwatch. “Look, Buzz is going to be back here any minute, and there’s something I want to discuss with you in private.” He frowned. “I’ve got a busy afternoon ahead of me shoveling us out of the shit pile you’ve dumped us in, so you meet me in my office tonight at nineteen hundred hours. Sharp.”
Goddamn, Greene thought glumly, I’ve got a date…
He’d have to cancel. Colonel Dougan may have cooled down, but he sure as fuck didn’t look like he was ready to take a raincheck.
“Yes, sir, I’ll be there. Nineteen hundred. Sharp.”
(Three)
That evening, Greene put on his best uniform, hoping that a spiffy appearance along with the sight of his ribbons grouped above his coat’s left breast pocket beneath his silver wings might help to mitigate Colonel Dougan’s ire over the morning’s airborne hi-jinks. He left his quarters a half hour early to make sure he wouldn’t be late for his appointment. He was already in up to his neck in shit; no way was he getting in any deeper by keeping Dougan waiting.
There wasn’t much going on at the administration complex when Greene arrived there. Dougan’s office was on the first floor of a long, low, cinder-block wing surrounded by a vast expanse of hot-topped parking area. Inside, the administration wing reminded Greene of a fifties-era high school in a predominantly blue-collar suburban town. As he made his way through the quiet, fluorescent-lit hallways, past the maple veneer hollow-core doors, he now and again heard the sound of a typewriter clacking, or a voice murmuring into a telephone.
There was no one on duty at the clerk’s desk outside the colonel’s office, so Greene knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Dougan called.
Greene, unsure how to play this, stepped into the office, closed the door behind him, came smartly to attention, and said, “Captain Greene reporting as ordered, sir.”
Dougan, who was wearing an open-collared duty uniform, looked amused as he leaned back in his swivel chair, eyeing Greene. The colonel’s office was small, with turquoise painted cinder-block walls, gray metal office furniture, and a window overlooking the parking lot. On a filing cabinet a small, sickly-looking yellow-green cactus plant shared space with a tiny plastic watering can. The office’s walls were decorated with several posters showing jet fighters in flight; a movie poster for Somebody Up There Likes Me. starring Paul Newman; and a framed, yellowed, cardboard fight card. Down near the bottom of the card, a bout description read “Dukes Dougan vs. Slammer McCoy.”
Colonel Dougan must have noticed Greene looking at the fight card. “I’ll never forget that guy McCoy,” he said. “He wasn’t that big. Just a welterweight like me, but one minute into the first round and I knew I was in trouble. I gave that son of a bitch my best punch, and it hurt him. I know it did, because he spat blood. But then he just smiled at me with his fucking bloody teeth. He looked positively gleeful….” Dougan trailed off, shaking his head. “Scariest thing I ever saw. I’ll never fucking forget it.”
“What happened, sir?” Greene asked. “Did he win?”
The colonel nodded. “Third round, they stopped the fight. My fucking nose was bleeding too much.” He shrugged. “I didn’t give a shit. I knew that was my last fight as soon as I saw that son of a bitch McCoy laughing off my punch.” He snapped his fingers. “I just knew it like that. The thing was, I knew I couldn’t take this guy, and he was a nobody! A… a…”
“A palooka?” Greene offered.
Dougan laughed. “Yeah, a palooka.” He gestured to the fight card hanging on the wall. “After that fight, I knew I wasn’t gonna get any closer to the top of the card than right there, and that wasn’t high enough for me. Next day, I hung up my gloves and enlisted in the Air Force.”
“It turned out to be a good move for you, sir.”
“Yeah, it was.” Dougan nodded. “But I want to talk to you about your next move, Captain. Pull up a chair.”
As Greene sat down, he saw the colonel take a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses out of his desk drawer. This is turning out all right, after all, Greene thought, beginning to feel relieved.
Dougan poured a couple of shots. “Got no ice, but there’s some water in that watering can by the cactus… ?”
“I like it fine, straight up, sir.” Greene waited for Dougan to take a swallow of whiskey, and then sipped at his own.
“All right, let’s get old business done with,” Dougan began. “I called in some favors, and managed to get you and Blaisdale out of the deep serious over that stunt you two pulled today.”
“Thanks, Colonel.”
“Fuck thanks,” Dougan scowled. “I didn’t do it only for you guys. It was my ass out on the line, as well. Don’t forget, it was me that let you take that prototype up in the first place. “
“God, that’s right,” Greene remarked. “Gee, I really am sorry, sir,” he said sincerely. “I never meant for you to get in trouble. I guess that in the heat of the moment I just didn’t think—”
“That’s it exactly,” Dougan cut him off sharply. “You didn’t! You’ve got the classic successful fighter jock’s inclination to act instinctively. That’s an admirable trait to have in a dogfight. Captain, but it can really put you in the deep serious when it comes to life.”
“Yes, sir,” Greene said, although he wasn’t really clear as to what the colonel was talking about.
“Fuck it, though,” Dougan said, mellowing. “What happened today is over now as far as I’m concerned.” He raised his whiskey glass. “Let’s just forget about it.”
Fine with me, Greene thought as he clinked glasses with the colonel.
“All right,” Dougan continued gruffly. “After today I think you’ve about worn out your welcome around here, and the lab coats are ready to use a new pilot to shake the bugs out of their simulator’s computer programs. It’s time to talk about your next assignment.”
“Sir, as you know, I was hoping to be assigned to a tactical fighter wing.”
“I know that,” Dougan said, pouring them both another drink. “And it’s a possibility, but I heard about something else you might be interested in. It’s kind of an unusual assignment, but one that might lead to something for you.”
Greene shrugged. “I’m listening, Colonel.”
“You and I were both in Vietnam,” Dougan began. “My tour was over before there was much air-to-air action, but I understand you saw some?”
“Yes, sir. Mostly the F-4s flew MiGCap, but now and again us Thud drivers got the chance to tangle with gomer.”
“You bag any?”
“I sparked one once, Colonel. It was a MiG-17. I managed to land some hits with my cannon before the damned gun jammed on me.” Greene sighed. “Gomer got to suck down his fish sauce that day, sir.”
Dougan seemed to wave the matter aside. “You were flying bombing missions anyway, son. Not MiGCap. You were lucky to get the taste you did.”
Greene nodded. “I guess, sir. A little while after that incident, I was offered the chance to transition into a Phantom fighter squadron, but I declined. Those twin-seaters never appealed to me. I guess I’m kind of antisocial when it comes to flying.” He smiled ruefully. “But every now and again, especially since I’ve been doing so much simulator ACM, I find myself thinking about my Fishbed, the one that got away. I can still see that MiG-17 framed in my gunsight. I fire. The sparks rise off his wings, but then the gun jams, and I can’t do anything but watch my kill fly away home.”
“That’s an experience a lot of
fighter pilots who served in Vietnam have had,” Dougan remarked sadly, sipping at his whiskey. “And their weapons functioned.”
“I’m not sure I follow you, Colonel.”
“It’s like this, son,” Dougan explained. “During World War Two and in Korea, the U.S. military air-combat kill ratio was something on the order of ten to one: For every one of us the enemy got, we knocked down ten of them. That was good, but then along came Vietnam. We went into it full of piss and vinegar: After all, we were flying state-of-the-art airplanes, and gomer was fielding for the most part twenty-year-old subsonic MiGs. But then a funny thing happened. We found that our kill ratio dropped to two to one. That was unacceptable. We couldn’t continue to trade a multimillion-dollar Phantom jet and its even more precious two-man crew for every pair of crappy old MiGs we managed to bag. Both the Air Force and the Navy knew what was wrong: crummy missile performance, crippling rules of engagement—”
“Yes, sir,” Greene interrupted. “There were more places we couldn’t hit the enemy than places we could.”
Dougan nodded. “But the most important missing element in our bag of tricks was decent training in ACM. The brass thought the day of the dogfight was over, but they were wrong, and our guys were frying, or ending up in the Hanoi Hilton because of their mistake. The Navy did something about this. In 1969 they established a kind of fighter pilot’s Ph.D. program in ACM for their F-4 Phantom crews. They called it The United States Navy Postgraduate Course in Fighter Weapons Tactics and Doctrine.”
Greene nodded. “Top Gun.”
Dougan smiled. “Funny nickname for that outfit, considering that the Navy’s Phantoms weren’t armed with guns, but Top Gun it was, and it did the trick. Before Top Gun, the Navy’s kill ratio was two to one. After Top Gun, it jumped to around thirteen to one. Meanwhile, the Air Force’s kill ratio actually got a little worse as the war progressed, until we initiated our own tactical training programs.”
“Yes, sir.” Greene vaguely nodded, sipping at his drink, wondering where this conversation was headed. “We’ve got our Fighter Weapons School….” FWS was a course in ACM given to selected Air Force pilots who were supposed to take what they’d learned back to their squadrons.
“We’ve got that, and a few other programs,” Dougan said. “But what we’ve got doesn’t go far enough. The feeling is that the Air Force needs something akin to the all-encompassing experience of computerized flight-simulation scenarios, but in out in the real world, in real airplanes. To that end, something new is in the preliminary planning stages” —the colonel’s eyes gleamed—“something that will make Top Gun look like a game of dodge ball in comparison.”
“What is it, Colonel?” Greene asked quickly, catching a bit of the colonel’s enthusiasm.
“It’s not anything definite, yet, son. The pieces haven’t all been cut out, let alone put together, at this point. I do know this much, the whole shebang is code-named ‘Red Sky,” and a chunk of it is based on Top Gun’s idea of having a core of instructor pilots flying full-time ACM against visiting groups of experienced pilots.”
“Full-time ACM?” Greene gasped. “Holy shit, sir…”
Dougan laughed. “I thought you’d like the sound of that, Captain. Imagine, those instructors will be mock dogfighting most every day.” He winked. “The way you and Lieutenant Blaisdale were doing this morning.”
“It sounds like hog heaven, Colonel.”
“Figured you’d say that.” Dougan smiled. “Now, here’s the good part. Senior officers like myself have been asked to keep an eye out for likely candidates to participate in Red Sky’s eventual implementation.”
“I’d like to volunteer,” Greene said instantly.
Dougan nodded. “And I have it in mind to recommend you, and I’m considering Buzz Blaisdale, but that’s another story. So, then, you think you’d like a piece of what I’ve been describing?”
“Yes, sir!”
The colonel warned, “Before you sign on the dotted line, you’d best know that there’s a catch.”
Greene sighed, thinking, there always is. “What do I have to do. Colonel?”
Dougan said it absolutely deadpan: “Join the Navy.”
Greene laughed. “Come on. Seriously, sir?”
“Never more serious in my life, Captain,” Dougan replied. “You want this, you’re going to have to join the Navy to get it.” He held up his hand to stop Greene before he could reply. “I don’t mean literally, but you will be assigned aircraft-carrier duty, assuming you can hack carrier landing training.”
“Sir, slow down!” Greene pleaded. He set his glass on Dougan’s desk. “Either I’ve had too much sour mash, or something here isn’t making sense.”
“Okay.” Dougan nodded. “I’ll start from the beginning. On one hand, the Air Force wants to build on what the Navy has accomplished through Top Gun. On the other hand, the Air Force is a little touchy about perpetuating the widely held notion that the Navy flew rings around us over Vietnam.”
Greene nodded. “In Vietnam, I remember I heard a lot of disillusioned griping about how the Air Force had become a bombing outfit, and that when it came to ACM the time had come to face reality and let the Navy handle it.”
“It’s not that we’ve got a lot to learn, so much as we’ve got a lot to relearn,” Dougan replied. “When it came to dogfìghting the Air Force used to have it, but we’ve lost it, and now we want to get it back. The Air Force wants to benefit from the Navy’s training and ACM procedures. The question is how to do that without humiliating ourselves in the process. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, small detachments of Navy fighter pilots who’d graduated Top Gun visited Air Force fighter squadrons in Thailand to try to teach them ACM tactics. The Navy guys supposedly did their best, but our own men were simply too uptight over the notion of being tutored by squids to really profit from the experience. This time around, the Air Force thinks the tutelage process might work better if the situation is reversed: if a couple of Air Force hotshots are dropped into a squid environment. Accordingly, they and the Navy came up with Operation Indian Giver.”
“Kerrist!” Greene scowled. “I’d like to meet the guy who comes up with the names for this stuff.”
“That guy’s ultra top secret,” Dougan muttered, nodding in bemused agreement.
“Why not just send me to Top Gun School?” Greene asked.
“Senior-level personnel will be attending Miramar,” Dougan replied. “But the Air Force wants to do it the other way, as well.” He shrugged. “If you want to read between the lines, I figure that what the Air Force wants is to see how good the average Navy fighter pilot is.”
“You mean the guy who never gets to Top Gun,” Greene mused.
“Right on,” Dougan said. “Anyway, as you can imagine, there’s no shortage of Air Force fighter jocks who’d like to get in on the ground floor of Red Sky. I’d like to see you make the cut, because I think you’ve got the makings of an excellent ACM instructor. I could put you on the list of guys who’d like to take a Top Gun tour, but you’d be farther down on that sheet than I was on that fight card I’ve got hanging.”
“I read you, Colonel,” Greene said glumly.
“I think your best chance would be if you volunteered for the least popular aspect of the preliminary program.”
“Which is Indian Giver.” Green sighed. “Long-term bunking with the squids on a flattop.”
Dougan nodded. “The word is that there’s been a deafening silence of guys volunteering for Indian Giver. It means eight months, or maybe longer, cruising on a flattop, and before that an extended period of training in order to qualify to land on a carrier.” Dougan’s expression turned sour. “The squid fighter jocks have always lorded it over us blue-suiters on the topic of carrier landings. As far as the squids are concerned, they can do something we can’t. Just between us, I agree that they’ve got something worthwhile to crow about. We’ve got some fine fighter pilots, but not a one of them has ever had to prove himself by sett
ing down a screaming jet on a little scrap of metal moving and tilting on a big ocean.”
“I can do it, sir, given the training,” Greene declared adamantly. “If it can be done, I can do it.”
“I figured you were sure enough of yourself to at least give it a shot,” Dougan smiled.
Greene asked, “You said you were also thinking about recommending Lieutenant Blaisdale for Indian Giver?”
“Indian Giver calls for several two-man Air Force evaluation teams,” Dougan acknowledged.
“Colonel, it sure would be be a lot easier to handle being surrounded by all those squids if I had my buddy along.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Dougan said wryly. “Captain Greene, you now know the whole of it. Or at least as much about Red Sky as I do. So how about it? You want in or out of Indian Giver? If you’re willing to volunteer, I’ll start the paperwork. Assuming approval, you’ll be temporarily reassigned to a paper Tactical Fighter Training Group and released to Indian Giver. First off, the Air Force will teach you how to keep detailed notes on everything you’ll be learning. Next you’ll be sent to Pensacola so that the squids can start checking you out. Eventually, assuming you do hack the squids’ program, you’ll be flying along-side our web-footed friends on training operations.” He paused. “But don’t forget, Captain, you’ve got other options. I could still likely get you assigned to a traditional fighter squadron.”
Screw that, Greene thought as he briefly allowed himself the luxury of daydreaming of a time when he was somewhere happily ensconced as a Red Sky instructor, with nothing to do but fly ACM against the best and the brightest, every blessed day of his life.
“I’ll go with Indian Giver, sir, assuming they’ll have me.” Greene laughed. “I’d do submarine duty if it offered me a way into Red Sky.”
CHAPTER 7
(One)
New York City
8 May, 1974
Don Harrison’s cab ride seemed to take forever. It was a Wednesday morning, the midtown traffic was bad, and the rumpled Checker cab was uncomfortable. But then, Harrison rarely rode in cabs. They were an endangered species in car-crazy L.A.