With its twin engines bellowing a roar that could be heard for several miles, the Intruder departed the earth with a delicate wiggle, a perceptible rocking of the wings that Rita Moravia automatically smoothed with the faintest side pressure on the control stick. She had let the takeoff trim setting rotate the plane’s nose to eight degrees nose-up and had stopped it there with a nudge of forward stick in that delicious moment when the weight of twenty-five tons of machine and fuel was transferred from the main landing gear to the wings. This was the transition to flight, a shimmering, imprecise hesitation as the machine gathered its strength and the wings took a firm bite into the warm morning air.
Now safely airborne, Rita slapped the gear handle up with her left hand. Her right thumb flicked at the coolie-hat button on the top of the stick, trimming the stick pressure to neutral as the twin-engined warplane accelerated.
She checked to make sure the landing gear were up and locked. They were. Temps, RPMs, fuel flow normal. Oil and hydraulic pressure okay. Using her left hand again, she raised the flap handle as she caressed the stick with her right to hold the nose steady through the configuration change. Accelerating nicely. Flaps and slats up and in and the stabilizer shifted, she isolated the flight hydraulic system and continued to trim. At 290 knots indicated she pulled the nose higher into the sky in order to comply with Jake Grafton’s directive not to exceed 300 knots.
Toad had activated the IFF and was talking to Departure. Now he switched to Los Angeles Center. The controller asked him to push the identification button on the IFF—“squawk ident”—and he complied. “Xray Echo 22, radar contact Come left to a heading of 020. Passing Flight Level 180, proceed on course.”
Rita Moravia dipped the left wing as Toad rogered.
When she leveled the wings on course, still climbing, he was humming and singing over the ICS as he tuned the radar presentation and checked that he had properly entered the computer way-points. “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go, with a hi-hi-hee and a fiddly-dee, hi-hi, ho-ho…”
Rita grinned behind her oxygen mask. Flying with the Toadman was an experience. No wonder Captain Grafton’s face softened every time he saw Tarkington.
She leveled the plane at Flight Level 310—31,000 feet—and engaged the autopilot. Just above them a thin, wispy layer slid across the top of the canopy, so close it seemed they could almost reach up and let the gauzy tendrils slip around their fingers. Rita looked ahead and tried to find that point where the motion of the ropy filaments seemed to originate as they came racing toward the cockpit, accelerating as the distance closed. It was like flying just under an infinite, flat ceiling—some Steven Spielberg effect to give the audience a rush of speed and wonder as the woofers oomphed and the seats throbbed, before the credits came on the screen.
After a moment she disengaged the autopilot and let the nose creep up a smidgen. Almost imperceptibly the plane rose a hundred feet, where the cloud layer literally sliced around the cockpit. Toad picked that moment to withdraw his head from the radar scope and look slowly around. After a moment he glanced at her and caught her eye. She saw him wink, then readjust the hood and devote his attention to the computer and radar.
A lifetime of work, all for this.
She had been an outstanding student at an excellent suburban high school, one of those bright youngsters who applied themselves in a frenzy of self-discipline and diligence that separated her from her classmates, who were more interested in boys, music and peer acceptance than school. She had shocked everyone, including her parents, by her announcement that she wanted to attend a military academy. In due course an appointment to the Naval Academy came from a congressman who knew better than to echo her mother’s surprise or horror in an era when socially correct posturing was more important than his voting record.
So she set forth bravely that summer after high school, at the age of eighteen, set off into the unknown world of plebes at the Naval Academy, this girl who had never set foot on a military installation, this girl who knew only that she wanted to make her own way in life and that way would be much different from those of her mother or the friends of her youth.
It had been worse than different. It had been horrid, humiliating nightmare beyond anything she had imagined in her worst moments of trepidation. All the sly taunts of her friends, bound for sororities and, they hoped, excellent marriages, hadn’t even hinted at the emotional trauma she experienced those first weeks. During the day she braced and marched and ran and endured the hazing and shouting to the point of exhaustion, and at night she sobbed herself to sleep wondering if she had made the right choice. Finally one day she realized that she hadn’t cried in a week. Her second, more important revelation occurred one morning at breakfast when an upperclassman had demanded to know the name of the Soviets’ chief arms negotiator. She had answered the question correctly, and as he turned his attention to a gawky boy from Georgia seated beside her, she realized that these people were demanding nothing from her she could not accomplish. From then on she had cheerfully endured, and finally excelled.
She thought of those times this morning as the Intruder flew out from under the thin cloud layer into a crystal-clear desert sky and Toad Tarkington, the professional who had been there and back, caressed the system with a loving touch. She had made the right choice.
Sixty miles out she once again disengaged the autopilot and lowered the nose slightly, then slowly pulled the throttles aft as her speed crept up toward 300 knots indicated. She always liked the feel of the plane as it descended in these long, shallow, power-on glides, gravity helping the engines drive the plane down into the thicker, denser air near the earth. She could feel every knot of the airspeed the engines didn’t generate—free airspeed it seemed, though of course it wasn’t Because she was the airplane and it was her, the energy was hers: the speed and the life and the power, she absorbed and possessed and became all of it.
Wingtip speed brakes cracked, but not enough. She flicked them out some more and felt the buffeting of the disturbed air, a gentle shaking that imparted itself to her through the stick and throttles and the seat in which she sat. Satisfied, she slid the speed-brake switch forward with her left thumb. The boards closed obediently and the buffeting ceased.
The desert below was baked brown and red and grayish black unleavened by the green of life. As she came down she could see sand and dirt in valleys and washes and rock the color of new iron in jagged cliffs and ridges.
Toad was chatting with Jake Grafton on the radio. “Never fear, the pros are here.”
“Amen,” Grafton replied. It’s a good thing Dodgers is back in China Lake, Rita thought
“Okay, Misty, I have you in sight. Drop to about 8,000 on the pressure altimeter”—the land here was 4,000 feet above sea level— “and come north up the valley until you see the van. It’s red and has a yellow cross on the top.”
“What kind of a cross,” she asked curiously.
“Dodgers’ son painted it. Three guesses.”
“I see it.” At this height it was just a speck amid the dirt and boulders.
“Okay, circle the van at a distance of three miles or so and I’ll tell you when to turn on your gadget.”
“Roger that” Toad said, and Rita flew away from the van, then turned to establish herself on the circle with her left wingtip pointed at the van.
Toad again examined the little box that had been taped to the top of the glare shield in front of him. The box wasn’t much. It had a three-position power switch which he had had in the middle, or standby, position for the last five minutes. While in standby the coolant was circulating around the Athena computer. Beside the power switch was a little green light that would come on to verify that the computer was receiving electrical power, and another light, yellow, to show when the system was detecting signals from an outside source. When that yellow light was on, the Athena system was doing its thing. There was a red light too, but that would illuminate only when the temperature of the super-cooled computer exceeded a level that endangered it. If that light came on, Toad was to turn off the system.
Down on the ground Jake watched Harold Dodgers and Helmut Fritsche at the radar control panel. “Got ’em,” Fritsche said after a bit, speaking loudly over the steady snoring of the engine of the generator mounted on the trailer behind the van. The engine noise muffled the moan of the Intruder’s engines except when it had passed almost overhead. Jake looked at the green display. “Tell ’em to turn it on.”
Jake did so. In less than two seconds the blip faded from the scope. Magic! Involuntarily he looked toward that spot in the sky where the plane had to be. Yes, there it was, just now a flash as the sun glinted from the canopy, then fading to a dull yet visible white spot in the washed-out blue. He looked again at the scope. Nothing.
“Maybe if they tightened the circle, flew closer,” Fritsche suggested.
The plane was still invisible. However, at five miles from the radar the strength of the emissions from Athena was too much: it beaconed and a false blip appeared at two miles and another at five.
“Dad’s gonna have to tweak it,” Harold Dodgers said, his voice confident and cheerful. “But by gum, it works.”
“Sure enough does,” Jake Grafton said, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Hard to believe, but that crackpot and his genius son had invented a device that would revolutionize warfare. Just as Admiral Henry had known it would.
After another twenty minutes, during which the Intruder flew back and forth in straight lines tangent to the five-mile circle so that Fritsche could chart the Athena’s protection envelope, Jake told Rita and Toad to go on back to China Lake, where Dr. Dodgers would tweak the computer. Then Rita and Toad would bring the plane back here for another session. Jake would have preferred to stage the plane from NAS Fallon, just a few miles west, but Admiral Dunedin had vetoed that on the grounds that base security there would be inadequate.
“Helmut, you better drive over to the range office and call Dodgers on the scrambler and tell him how it went. Then call Admiral Dunedin in Washington.”
“Sure.” Fritsche trotted over to the gray navy sedan parked near the van and left in a cloud of dust. Harold Dodgers killed the generator, which backfired once and fell silent. Now the Intruder’s engines were plainly audible, the moan echoing from the rocky ridges and outcrops.
“CAG,” said a male voice on the radio. “Are we sweet or what?”
“You’re sweet, Misty. See you this afternoon back here.”
Jake watched the white dot shrink to nothing in the blue sky as Rita climbed away to the south. When even the engine noise was gone and all he could hear was the wind whispering across the sand, he walked over to the shade by the side of the van and sat down.
Any way you looked at it, Athena was mind-boggling. A religious crackpot working in a shop that looks as if it should be full of broken-down cars comes up with an invention that will instantly obsolesce all conventional radar technology. But perhaps it wasn’t as wild as it appeared. After all, without the benefit of budgets, bureaucrats, and MBA supervisors worried about short-term profitability, Thomas Edison had single-handedly electrified the world and along the way fathered the recording and motion-picture industry. With the same advantages Samuel Dodgers had made junk of all existing military radar systems and the tactics and strategy built around those systems. And if you’re keeping score, he also just blew the B-2 program out of the sky. Why buy stealth bombers for $516 million each when you can make an existing plane invisible with a $250,000 device and some superglue?
A lot of people were going to be seriously unhappy when they heard. Powerful people, the kind that had both their senators’ unlisted Washington numbers on their Rolodex.
Jake Grafton picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers. Tyler Henry, Ludlow, Royce Caplinger—they were sitting on a bomb. No doubt they’ll let Jake Grafton go it alone for a while, stand out there by himself in front of the crowd as the duty expert. After he had run the bloomers up the flagpole and they had precisely measured the direction and velocity of the wind, then and only then would they decide what to do.
They must have been ecstatic when they realized that Jake Grafton was just the man they needed: a genuine, decorated live hero whom they could stand with shoulder to shoulder or disavow as a crazed maverick, whichever way the cookie crumbled. They would throw him to the sharks without a second thought if they concluded that course looked best. Too bad, but he always was an officer who couldn’t take orders, not a team player. And after that El Hakim thing, a bad concussion, psychiatrists; he was never right in the head. Too bad.
These powerful people whose boats would start leaking when the Athena secret came out, what would they do? Fight. How? What would be their weapons?
The dirt escaping his fingers made a sculpted pile. The wind swirled away a portion of each handful. The slower the dirt trickled from his fingers, the more of it the wind claimed.
The most probable argument, Jake decided, was that Athena would destabilize the existing East-West military balance. This argument had finesse. Athena was too cheap to argue the dollars. So argue the consequences. Argue that Athena pushes Russia closer to a first strike. Argue nuclear war and radioactive ashes and the Four Horsemen. If you can’t dazzle them with logic or baffle them with bullshit, then scare the bejesus out of them.
Jake stood and stirred the pile of dust with his toe. The wind carried it away grain by grain.
It was late afternoon, on the third flight of the day, and Rita was flying straight legs north and south, each leg one mile farther west of the radar site. Toad was bored. He was using the navigation system to ensure she stayed precisely where Captain Grafton wanted her to be. That was the hard part. After he had turned on the Athena system there was nothing to do but monitor its “operating” light. He did keep an eye on the Athena temp light, so if it came on he could turn off the system in a smart, military manner. For this the U.S. Navy was using its best Naval Flight Officer, a professional aerial warrior. Peace is hell.
Off to the west, down on the desert, was a long shadow cast by the two-story black windowless building that constituted the only structure in the town known as Deegon’s Well. That building was a whorehouse. Presumably it also contained the office of the mayor and the rest of the municipal employees. From this distance it appeared to be just a tiny box on the desert. He knew it was painted black and had two stories and no windows because he had once inspected it from the parking lot in front. Just a tourist, of course.
He keyed his ICS mike to call Rita’s attention to this famous landmark, but thought better of it.
Rita was checking the fuel remaining in the various tanks. He pressed his head against the radar hood and examined the cursor position.
He heard a whump, a loud, loose whump, and instantaneously the air pressure and noise level rose dramatically. Something struck him. He jerked his head back from the hood and looked around wildly.
The wind howled, shrieked, screamed, even through his helmet. Rita was back against her seat, slumped down, covered with gore, her right hand groping wildly for her face.
A bird! They had hit a bird.
He keyed the ICS without conscious thought and said her name. He couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice.
The plane was rolling off on one wing, the nose dipping. He used his left hand to grab the stick between Rita’s knees and center it.
Slow down. They had to slow down, had to lessen the velocity of the wind funneling through that smashed-out left quarter panel. The bird must have come through there and crashed against Rita as she bent over the fuel management panel on the left console.
He pulled back on the stick to bring the nose up into a climb and concentrated on keeping the wings level. Higher. Higher. Twenty degrees nose-up. Airspeed dropping: 250 indicated, 240, 230—he should drop the gear and flaps, get this flying pig slowed way down—210 knots.
The gear handle was on the left side of the instrument panel, right under the hole where the plexiglas quarter panel used to be, right under that river of air that was pressurizing the cockpit.
He tried to reach it. Just beyond his fingertips. Harness release unlocked. No go. Juggling the stick with his left hand, he used his right to release the two Koch fittings on the top of his torso harness. If the seat fired now he wouldn’t have a parachute. He reached again. Nope. He was going to have to unfasten the Koch fittings that held his bottom to the ejection seat. With fingers that were all thumbs he released the two catches, then attacked the bayonet fittings on his oxygen mask. Might as well get it off too. He jerked loose the cord that went to the earphones in his helmet.
Damn—he was stalling. He could feel the buffet and the nose pitched forward. He let it go down and got some airspeed, then eased it back.
He was having difficulty holding the wings level. Power at about 86 percent on both engines. That was okay. But the smell—Jesus God!
The overpowering odor made his eyes water. He tried to breathe only through his mouth.
No longer restrained by the inertia reel in the ejection seat, he grasped the stick with his right hand and stretched across with his left to the gear handle and slapped it down.
Now for the flaps. He was lying across the center console, trying to keep his head out of the wind blast as he felt for the flap lever beside the throttle quadrant. Leave the throttles alone. Get the flaps down to thirty degrees. Fumbling, he pulled the lever aft.
Toad was overcorrecting with the stick as he fought to keep the wings level, first too much one way, then too much the other. Goddamn, those peckerhead pilots do this without even thinking about it.
There! Gear down and locked. Flaps and slats out, stabilator shifted. Hallelujah.
He glanced up at Rita. She had shit and blood and gore all over her face and shoulders. Feathers. They were everywhere!
Her helmet—it was twisted sideways. Using glances, he tried to wipe off the worst of the crap with his left hand as he concentrated on holding the plane straight and level: 140 knots now, 8,300 feet on the altimeter. Conditions in the cockpit were a lot better.
Were there any mountains this high around here? He couldn’t remember, and he couldn’t see over the top of the instrument panel, bent over the way he was.
First things first. He twisted her helmet back straight. The face shield was shattered, broken, but it had protected her face and eyes from the worst of the impact.
She was dazed. She damn well better come out of it quick, because he sure couldn’t land this plane.
Her right eye was covered with goo, whether hers or the bird’s he couldn’t tell. He wiped at it with his gloved fingers. The bird’s.
Her left eye was clear but unfocused, blinking like crazy. “C’mon, Rita baby. I can’t keep flying this thing!” In his frustration he shouted. She couldn’t hear him.
Back to the panel: 135 knots. Maybe he could engage the autopilot.
Yeah, the autopilot. If it would work. He jabbed at the switches and released the stick experimentally. Yeah! Hot damn! It engaged.
He devoted his attention to her. Cuffed her gently, rubbed her cheeks. She shook her head and raised her right hand to her face.
He got himself rearranged in his seat and held his mask to his face. “Rita?” Nothing. No sound in his ears. Now what? He had forgotten to plug the cord to his helmet back in. He did so. “God-damnit, Rita,” he roared. “Snap out of it.”
Someone was talking on the radio. He listened. He could hear the words now. It was Grafton. Toad keyed the radio mike. “We took a bird hit. Rita’s a little dazed. We’re going to land at Fallon when she comes around.”
“Understand you took a bird. Where?”
“Right in the cockpit, CAG. Hit Rita in the head. We’re going to Fallon when she comes around. Now I’m leaving this freq and calling Fallon on Guard.” Without waiting for a reply, he jabbed the channelization switches and called Fallon tower. “Fallon tower, this is Misty 22 on Guard. Mayday. We’re fifteen or twenty miles out. Roll the crash truck.”
Which way are we heading? 120 degrees. He tugged the stick to the right and settled into a ten-degree turn, which the autopilot held. Fallon was off to the west here somewhere. He craned to see over the instrument panel in that direction.
“Misty 22, Fallon tower on Guard. Roger your Mayday. Come up…” and the controller gave them a discrete frequency.
Hey, stupid, look at the radar. He examined it. Be patient, Toad, be patient. You’re doing okay, if only Rita comes around. And if she doesn’t, well, screw it. You can figure out some way to eject her right over the runway, then you can hop out. Too bad those penny-pinchers in the puzzle palace never spent the bucks for a command ejection system for the A-6. But you can get her out somehow. It’s been done before. There—that must be the base there, just coming onto the screen from the right. He waited until it was dead ahead, then pushed the stick left until the wings were level. Now he dialed in the Fallon tower freq and gave them a call.
Rita was using her right arm to get her left up to the throttle quadrant. “Toad?”
“Yeah. You okay?”
“What—”
“Bird strike. All that goo on you is bird shit and gore. Relax, it ain’t you. Can you see?”
“I think—right eye’s blurred. This wind. Left is red—blood— can’t see…”
“Okay. I got the gear and flaps down and we’re on autopilot motoring toward Fallon. After a while or two you’re gonna land this thing. Just sit back right now and get yourself going again.”
She rubbed at her face with her right hand.
The autopilot dropped off the line. Automatically she grasped the stick and began flying.
“See,” exclaimed Toad Tarkington triumphantly, “you can do it! All fucking right! We’re almost home. Raise your left wing.” She did so and he resumed his monologue, only to pause occasionally to answer a question over the radio.
Rita Moravia flew by instinct, her vision restricted to one eye, and that giving her only a blurred impression of the attitude instruments on the panel before her. It was enough. She could feel the plane respond to her touch, and confirmation of that response was all she needed from her vision. Needed now. She would need to see a lot better to land. The wind—it was part of the problem. The wind wasn’t coming into the plane through the shattered quarter panel at 140 knots—the closed cockpit prevented that—but it was coming in at an uncomfortable velocity and temperature.
Cold. She was cold. She should slow some more.
She tugged at the throttles with her left hand. Her arm was numb: her fingers felt like they were frozen. The power levers came back, though the engine-RPM and fuel-flow tapes were too blurred to read. Still she turned her head and squinted with her good eye. She could make out the angle-of-attack stoplight indexer on the glare shield and trimmed to an on-speed condition.
For the first time she looked outside, trying to see the ground. Just a blurred brown backdrop. But Toad could get her lined up.
She tried to make her left thumb depress the ICS button, and after a few seconds succeeded. “Where are we?”
“Come left about twenty degrees and start a descent to…oh, say, six thousand. Can you see?”
“I can see to fly. Can’t see outside very well. Get me lined up and all and I think I can do it.”
Toad got back on the radio.
She made the heading change and only then retarded the throttles slightly and let the nose slip down a degree or so. One thing at a time. She had once had an instructor who liked to chant that to his students, who were often in over their heads. When it’s all going to hell, he used to say, just do one thing at a time.
The plane sank slowly, the altimeter needle swinging counterclockwise with about the speed of an elevator indicator. So they had all day. Go down slow and you have an easy transition at the bottom. Go down too fast and…As she sat there she continued to blink and flex her left arm. Doesn’t feel like anything’s broken, just numb. Maybe the world’s most colorful bruise on my shoulder, some orange-and-purple splotch that will be the envy of every tattooed motorcyclist north of Juárez.
She was hurting now. As the numbness wore off she was hurting. Her face felt like someone had used a steak hammer on it. Like she had slid down the sidewalk on her cheekbone for a couple hundred yards.
“Come right about fifteen degrees or so and you’ll be lined up,” Toad said. “You got fourteen thousand feet of concrete here, Rita, but I think we should try for a wire.” He reached up with his left hand and pulled the handle to drop the tailhook. “Just keep it lined up and descending wings level and we’ll be in fat city.”
“Fuel? How’s our fuel?”
“About ten grand or so. Just a little heavy. Let’s dump the fuel in the wings.”
Rita reached with her left hand, up there under that blown-out quarter panel, for the dump switch on the fuel management panel. “I can’t get it,” she said finally.
“I’ll get it.” Toad leaned across and hunted until he had the proper switch.
“Landing checklist.”
“Okay, you got three down and locked, flaps and slats out, stab shifted, boards?” She put them out and added some power. It took a while to get the plane stabilized on speed again.
“Pop-up?” Toad murmured when she once again had everything under control. “Can you check the flaperon pop-up?” The switch was on her left console. She had to lower her head and look as she fumbled with numb fingers. “Watch your wings,” Toad warned.
She brought the wings back to level.
“Screw the pop-up,” Toad announced, figuring that she just couldn’t ascertain the switch position. “It’s probably still on. Check the brakes.”
This also took some doing. She had to lift both feet free of the deck where her heels rested and place the balls of her feet on top of the rudder pedals, then push. She had never before realized what a strain that put on her stomach muscles. She was weak as a kitten. She struggled and got her feet arranged and pushed hard. They met resistance. “Brakes okay.” She would have to do this again on the runway if the hook skipped over the short-field arresting gear or she landed long. For now she let her feet slide down the pedals until her heels were once again on the deck.
“My mask.” She gagged. “Get my mask off!”
Toad got her right fitting released just in time. She retched and the vomit poured down over her chest.
Seeing Rita vomit and smelling that smell, Toad felt his own stomach turn over. He choked it back and helped her hold the plane level until she stopped heaving.
“Okay,” she said when she finally got her mask back on, “check your harness lock and we’re ready to do it.” She took her hand off the stick and locked the harness lever on the forward right corner of the ejection seat.
“Oh, poo,” Toad said. She glanced his way. He was reconnecting his Koch fittings. “Sort of forgot to strap myself back in,” he explained.
She ran her seat up as far as she could and yet still reach the rudder pedals. This put her a face a little higher out of the wind, and in seconds she could see better, but only out of her right eye. Her left was still clogged with blood.
“You’re coming down nicely, passing six thousand MSL, eighteen hundred above the ground. Let’s keep this sink rate and we’ll do okay. Come left a couple degrees, though.”
She complied.
“A little more. And gimme just a smidgen more power.”
When she squinted and blinked a few more times, she could make out the runway. There was a little crosswind and Toad had her aimed off to the left slightly to compensate.
The approach seemed to take forever, perhaps because she was hurting and perhaps because she was unsure if she could handle it at the bottom. She would just have to wait and see, but it was difficult waiting when she was so cold, and growing colder.
She let the plane descend without throttle corrections, without wiggling the stick or trying to sweeten her lineup. With three hundred feet still to go on the radar altimeter, she made a heading correction. She was going to have trouble judging the altitude with only one eye, and she thought about that. She could do it, she decided. There was the meatball on the Optical Landing System. She began to fly it, working mightily to move the throttles. Still coming down, on speed, lined up, across the threshold. Now! Throttles back a little and nose just so, right rudder and left stick to straighten her out…oh yes!
The mainmounts kissed the concrete.
The pilot used the stick to hold the nose wheel off as she smoothly closed the throttles. She had no more than got the engines to idle when she felt the rapid deceleration as the tailhook engaged the short-field arresting gear. The nose slammed down. As the plane was jerked to a rapid stop, she applied the brakes.
She got the flap handle forward with her left hand, but knew she wouldn’t be able to tug hard enough to pull the parking brake handle out. Toggling the harness lock release by her right thigh, she got enough freedom to reach it with her right.
Toad opened the canopy. As it whined its way aft a fire truck came roaring up and screeched to a halt with firemen tumbling off.
Canopy open, Rita checked that the flaps and slats were in. Her left shoulder was aching badly now and it was difficult to make her fingers do as she wished. One of the firemen ran out from the wheel well and made a cutting motion across his throat. He had inserted the safety pins in the landing gear.
Both throttles around the horn to cutoff, engine-fuel master switches off as the RPMs dropped. Then the generators dropped off the line with an audible click and everything in the cockpit went dead. Exhausted, she fumbled with the generator switches until they too were secured.
It was very quiet. She got the mask loose and, using only her right hand, pried the helmet off. The compressor blades tinkled steadily, gently, as the wind kept them turning, like a mobile on the porch of your grandmother’s house when you returned after a long absence.
A man was standing on the pilot’s boarding ladder. He looked at her and drew back in horror.
“A bird,” she croaked.
She heard Toad give a disgusted exclamation. “Wipe it off her, man! It’s just bird guts. It ain’t her brains!”
They were loading Rita into an ambulance and the crash crew was filling out paperwork when a gray navy sedan screeched to a halt near the fire truck. Jake Grafton jumped out and strode toward Toad as white smoke wafted from the auto’s engine compartment.
“Looks like you were in a hurry,” Toad said, and managed a grin. He was sitting, leaning back against the nose wheel, too drained to even stand. He felt as if he had just finished a ten-mile run. The crash chief tossed the captain a salute and he returned it even though he wasn’t wearing a hat. He obviously had other things on his mind.
“How’s Rita?”
“Gonna be okay, I think. When they looked at her they thought she had brains and eyeballs oozing out everywhere, but they got most of it cleaned off. Never saw so much shit. Must have been a damn big bird. They’re taking her over to the hospital for X rays and all.”
Jake Grafton deflated visibly. He wiped his forehead with a hand, and then wiped his hand on his trousers, leaving a wet stain.
“How come you didn’t answer me on the damned radio? I about had heart failure when you started doing whifferdills.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I disconnected my plugs and got a little unstrapped so I could reach over and fly the plane. Rita was sorta out of it there for a little while.”
Jake climbed the pilot’s ladder and surveyed the cockpit. He examined the hole left in the plexiglas quarter panel by the late buzzard or eagle or hawk. “She come around okay?”
“Came to and landed this thing like it was on rails. Real damn sweet, CAG. Never saw a better landing.”
A sailor drove up aboard a yellow flight-line tractor. He swung in front of the plane and backed a tow bar toward the nose wheel. “Well,” said Jake Grafton as he made a quick inspection of the Athena antennas, all of which seemed to be firmly in place, “you better zip over to the hospital and let them check you over too. I gotta get this plane put someplace private.”
“Uh, CAG, you’re still gonna let us fly the prototypes, aren’t you? I mean, it wasn’t like we tried to hit that bird or anything.”
Jake looked at Toad, slightly surprised. “Oh,” he said, “you two are my crew. If the doctors say you can fly. Now get over to the hospital and find out. Better get cleaned up too. You look like you’ve been cleaning chickens and the chickens won.”
“Yessir. You bet. But, uh, I don’t have a ride. Can I take your car?”
“Aw, Toad, you’re gonna get that bird goo all over the seat.” He glanced at the car. Smoke was still leaking out. It was junk. “Keys are in it. But be careful—it’s government property.”
Amazingly enough, the car engine actually started after Toad ground on it awhile. Jake had driven about forty miles at full throttle, about a hundred miles per hour, so he shook his head in wonder when the transmission engaged with a thunk and Toad drove away trailing smoke.