Hypersonic Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age (25 page)

V. R. was his deputy, clearly being groomed to command the unit when the time came. If his work hadn’t been so important—and if they didn’t have an important mission coming up—Tobin would simply have grounded him. Instead, he did something he hated to do—put a superior officer on the spot. He used a secure line to call Steve O’Malley, a three-star now, but an old friend.

“Can we talk off the record, General?”

“Yes, if you drop the General. Call me Steve and spit it out.”

“Steve, you’ll probably spit me out after this, but I’m worried about V. R. Shannon. He’s become as convinced that the Muslims are our main enemy as you are.”

O’Malley grimaced. “Are you saying that he’s getting to be a nutcase like me? Look, I know everybody—well, most everybody—thinks I’m an alarmist over the terrorists, and the last thing I need is V. R. stoking the fires. But it’s understandable. First of all, he loved his wife, and the terrorists killed her. Second, he’s right just as I am—the terrorists are the biggest threat America has ever faced. What’s he doing that scares you? You wouldn’t call me if he was just shooting his mouth off.”

Tobin filled him on the loss of technique that he had perceived in V. R. over the last thirty days, emphasizing the apparent lapse in his
preflight. You didn’t dare overlook anything in the F-117. If something as minor as the door of the in-flight fueling receptacle was not perfectly flush, the airplane shed its stealth like a snake shedding a skin. Just flying the airplane was no more difficult than flying any modern jet fighter, but flying it in stealth mode was entirely different.

O’Malley said, “The main thing is this: do you think he’s safe to fly the 117? If he’s dangerous, pull him off. It will hurt him because flying is the only thing keeping him sane, but you can’t afford to let him kill himself or someone else.”

“I’m not going to ground him, not yet anyway, but I am going to wire-brush him to get his attention. I’m scheduled to brief him on his efficiency report this week and it is going to shock him. He’s never had anything but perfect ERs since the Academy and I’m going to bump him down a notch in two or three areas.”

“That’s pretty drastic, Toby. You’ll knock him out of the running for his first star if you do that. The competition is too tough nowadays to have anyone not walking on water be considered.”

“Well, I’m going to show him what the situation is now. If he shapes up, I’ll revise the ER before I submit it. But he doesn’t need to know that.”

“Well, it’s a plan. But before you go, Toby, let me tell you, he’s not wrong about the Muslims. They are after us. I’ve got a young guy, Seffy Bodansky, advising me on this. It is real. We have to change the way we do business. In the old days, when somebody attacked us, we sent in the Marines, we went to war. Nowadays we send for the cops and sue in an international court. As a result, the Muslims are laughing at us.”

O’Malley did not mention that he had more direct and dire news that he had from a trusted, impeccable source: Bob Rodriquez.

Tobin reverted to a formal tone, anxious to stave off O’Malley’s lecture on the Muslims. “Yes, sir, General O’Malley. I’ll keep that in mind.”

O’Malley sensed the change in tone, realized that he was preaching again, and slammed the phone down, saying, “You’ll see.”

December 19, 1989
Approaching Rio Hato, Panama

I
N TWO DAYS
it would be a year since Ginny died. V. R.’s eyes scanned the instruments constantly, but by rote; where once he flew as part of the amazing F-117A, now he was like most pilots, a guider, a watcher, someone superimposed on this magnificent weapon, not part of it. Where once his nerves and muscles had been an integral part of the Nighthawk’s fly-by-wire system, where his brain had been seamlessly integrated with the aircraft’s computers, now he was like an unsure cowboy atop a fractious horse.

It was Ginny’s death, of course, that intervened. He could not look at the night sky without wondering if that was the last thing she had seen. He could not endure the muted glow of his instrument panel, knowing that another glowing panel had flown her out to her death. Every flight used to be a soaring, soul-stirring aesthetic experience. Now flying was a penance, a painful anodyne that somehow kept him from shooting himself in the agony over Ginny’s loss. He no longer loved to fly, but he could simply not endure anything less demanding of his consciousness. He had become a menace when he drove a car, his relentless sorrow so preoccupying him that he didn’t even notice the angry bleat of horns as he breezed through stop signs or swerved from one lane to another, without regard to traffic.

It was not that he thought less often of Ginny when he flew. It was instead the relentlessly demanding nature of flying the F-117A that forced its way into his consciousness, forcing the thoughts of Ginny to the background, still there, but subordinate to the need to keep the aircraft flying well.

He had to keep thoughts of her in the background tonight, for this was the Nighthawk’s long-awaited combat debut. The United States had grown weary of Colonel Manuel Noriega’s increased belligerence. The drug dealer and money launderer had seized power in Panama in 1985, and since then busily expanded his businesses as he expanded Panama’s military forces. President George Herbert Walker Bush had declined going to the United Nations to settle the issue. Instead he authorized Operation Just Cause, designed to capture Noriega with minimum cost to the U.S. or to the Panamanians.

V. R. was flying in Bandit 27, the number two position in the lead element of a six-ship strike force of Nighthawks. The element was led by Major Greg “God” Dammers in Bandit 23. Their mission was to drop bombs close enough to disorient—but not kill—Noriega’s troops at the Rio Hato barracks, so that they did not oppose a parachute landing by Army Rangers.

He knew he should have been leading the flight and he knew why he wasn’t—Tobin had lost confidence in him. He grew angry, not with Tobin, but with himself. With Ginny gone, the only thing important to him was his job—and he was failing in it. And after seeing his ER—the worst he had ever received in his career—it would not have surprised him if Tobin had left him off the mission entirely.

Strangely enough, the ER, with its almost deadly certainty of killing any chance he had of being promoted to brigadier general, didn’t bother him. It had been fair. Tobin was right, he wasn’t doing well. But the possibility of not having flying to shield him from the pain of Ginny’s death filled his heart with fear.

Tonight’s raid was not as long as the strike on Libya—but long enough. The F-117As needed to tank up from their two accompanying KC-10A tankers at least five times for the round-trip. V. R.’s target was a Panamanian army base at Rio Hato, just sixty-five miles southwest of Panama City. It was the least important of the two missions, another sign of Tobin’s lack of confidence. The other four Nighthawks were tasked to support the special operations forces who were to capture Noriega himself and bring him to justice.

There had been so many briefings that even V. R., with his attention diverted, knew the mission by heart. At Rio Hata there was a big barracks complex where Battalion 2000, some of Noriega’s elite troops, was quartered. The mission planning called for the Nighthawks to drop two BLU-109 bombs, not on the barracks, but in the open field beside them. On the last briefing Tobin had jokingly called their two-thousand-pound bombs “the world’s biggest stun guns” for they were designed not to kill the sleeping soldiers, but simply stun them so they could not react to the simultaneous parachute landings by the U.S. 2nd Ranger Battalion. The bombs were fused to explode on impact to make the most noise and do the least damage possible.

As zero hour approached, V. R. felt more comfortable. He had gone through the preliminary “switchology” as they called the long
checklists that prepared the aircraft to drop. The only thing that bothered him was an unusual last-minute switch in the target coordinates.

Dammers began his attack, and V. R. followed; intuitively he knew that something was wrong, they were much closer to the coast than the briefings had called for. The bombs released, the doors opening and closing almost instantly, and the two Nighthawks pulled up for the long trip back as gunfire lit up the sky. Apparently the “stun-gun bombs” had failed, for the sky erupted with small-caliber gunfire as the Panamanians tried to fight off the attacking paratroopers.

As he headed back toward the first refueling track, V. R. reproached himself. If he had been himself, at the top of his form, if he had been doing what he should have been doing instead of wallowing in despair, he would have caught the error and corrected it. Now it looked like they had dropped their bombs far from the Rio Hato barracks. He hoped they hadn’t killed any innocent civilians. Worse, they had smeared the F-117A’s reputation. People were already calling it an expensive failure; a half-dozen articles by congressmen had “proved” it was a waste of money. Now he and Dammers had made them right and placed the whole stealth program in jeopardy. What the hell difference did it make that the enemy couldn’t see you coming if, when you got there, you couldn’t hit the enemy?

Sweating, stomach constricted, V. R. realized that Tobin had been exactly right when he told him that he had to make a decision. He was either going to be a flyer or a mourner. He couldn’t go on doing both. Now maybe he had the worst of worlds—Ginny was gone forever and he had flown himself out of the Nighthawk program.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE PASSING PARADE
: The Internet is created; Nelson Mandela freed in South Africa; Hubble Space Telescope launched, flaws discovered; Oliver North’s conviction overturned on appeal; Dr. Jack Kevorkian assists in suicide; Johnny Carson departs
The Tonight Show
; Baltic countries declare independence from Soviet Union; Iraqi troops seize Kuwait; East and West Germany reunited; Poland elects Lech Walesa President; Judge Clarence Thomas accused of sexual harassment; smoking banned on domestic airplane flights; Soviet Union disbanded, eleven separate republics form Commonwealth of Independent States; Boris Yeltsin becomes President of Russia; Mount Pinatubo erupts in Philippines, Clark Air Force Base covered in ashes.

August 3, 1990
The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

B
y God, you were right! Hussein isn’t kidding around. Iraqi troops have already overrun Kuwait. It’s just as you said, there’s been no resistance worth mentioning—the Kuwaitis were asleep at the switch.”

Steve O’Malley beamed across his desk at a man he had not seen for a decade, a man whose looks did not seem so much to have changed as intensified. Bob Rodriquez had always been fit, and now his thin wiry musculature spoke of long years of effort and denial. O’Malley knew that Bob was over sixty, but his dark hair and beard were barely flecked with gray. His face was lined and his eyes were almost lost in the habitual squint imposed by desert life.

Once staunch friends and business partners, they had fallen out when Rodriquez had attempted a hostile takeover of the firm Vance Shannon had founded. Shortly after the takeover attempt failed, Rodriquez disappeared into a murky world where rumors ranged from his death in a dope-smuggling flight to totally improbable stories of his working for the CIA. Now, tan and unusually dapper in a light tan summer suit, blue shirt, and red tie, Rodriquez seemed almost frail, dwarfed by O’Malley’s imposing desk.

One of his several phones rang and O’Malley excused himself to take the call. Rodriquez sat there, uncomfortable in his Western clothes, nervously playing with the plastic visitor’s tag affixed to the lapel of his suit. He had started out the morning early, giving two briefings at the State Department. O’Malley had picked him up and drove him to the Pentagon, where he had briefed twice again, once to the Joint Chiefs and once to a group of top Air Force officers specializing in Middle Eastern affairs.

Now he wanted more information from O’Malley about his ex-wife, Mae, his son, the Shannons, and all the rest of the people he had forsaken. O’Malley had already given him some of the most significant details on the ride over from State, and thoughtfully had a huge album of family pictures ready for him. It was not enough, he was hungry to know more.

O’Malley’s enthusiasm about at last coming to grips with the Muslim world in combat was very evident, and it troubled him. Rodriquez had spent more than eight years in that world, first perfecting his Arabic, then using his business acumen to gain commercial credibility. The CIA had started him out small and tentatively in a business he knew well, air-to-air missiles. He had provided contacts first, then moved into the illicit shipping of key parts. As he became known and trusted, he expanded into banking operations. With CIA approval, he had laundered millions of dollars for terrorist groups.

It was a double-edged sword. The money he laundered was intended to do harm to the Western world. The CIA believed this danger was more than offset by the intelligence he provided on the terrorists and their likely targets. He never tried to infiltrate a terrorist cell—it would be extraordinarily difficult for any non-Arab. But his dark complexion, facial features, and surprising language skills had enabled him to function in the terrorists’ world, where, as everywhere
else, if you followed the money, you got to the source of the problem. He was a conduit to many sources, from a simple, dedicated jihadist seeking immortality with a suicide bomb to the intricately layered corruption of Saudi royalty.

Rodriquez thought O’Malley’s attitude was simplistic. O’Malley’s solution was a massive attack on the Muslim world, one that would generate such damage and such fear that the Arab national and religious leaders would be forced to seize control of the terrorist movement and end it. Yet Rodriquez, even after his years of intimate acquaintance with Islam, could not offer a better solution. The masses of the Muslim world were passive, and the fanatic minority dictated not only religious policy, but secular political policy. In many ways it was not unlike Germany when the Nazis took over in 1933. Even among the Nazis the number of fanatics was comparatively small, but they exerted such control over their party, and over the nation, that they were able to force the world to go to war.