Return to Honor (3 page)

United States Air Force Material Command

elevation 2302 feet ASL

Although brown with dust, the white-bordered sign still managed to elicit a feeling of pride. He wouldn’t admit it, but having the opportunity to fly with the best … to walk quietly through the O-club with his orange flight suit and just
know
every fighter jock in the place would be envying him … to be at the cutting edge of technology … it was like living in heaven. It was something he wouldn’t admit to anyone, but man, it was great!

He was totally absorbed in the flying, from the TAV’s gut-wrenching launch to the recovery back at Edwards. He wasn’t just flying here, he was flirting with …
greatness.
The Yeagers of old had made their mark, and here he was—walking in their footsteps.

Ten years ago he would never have dreamed it possible. With a month to finish UPT (Undergraduate Pilot Training) he’d SIE’d to fly helicopters, giving up forever his chance to fly fixed-wings.

His wing commander had a fit: Here was Gould, Willie’s top stick, pulling a “Self-Initiated Elimination.” And why? Because it turned Gould’s stomach knowing he’d to have to live up to the fighter-pilot image. He was a good pilot, and he knew it. But the partying and carrying-on that went with the fighter-pilot mentality just wasn’t his style.

Ever since he’d turned down fixed-wings, he’d been incessantly told: “Are you out of your ever-lovin’, woman-chasin’, beer-drinkin’, ring-knockin’, one-each-issue, sex-crazed mind? What do you mean, turning down a chance for fighters for a piss-pot
helicopter?
Are you nuts?!”

Sure it was crazy—but it was something that, at the time, he just had to do.

And still he managed to get to the top, albeit through the back door. His only regret was that he never got to fly a “heavy”—a jumbo jet, such as a 787—so that when he retired from the air force he could ease on into a cushy civilian job flying for the airlines.

But no matter. Here he was: Local boy makes good. He made it to the top without flying fighters.

He was lucky to be assigned to Edwards straight out of choppers. Sure, it had never happened before; and sure, he’d had trouble transitioning back to fixed-wings from choppers, but who cared? He knew there wasn’t any truth to the story that he was the President’s long-lost cousin. He’d made it here on his own.

Besides, saving CINCSTRAT’s butt, when STRATCOM’s ubiquitous Airborne Command Post had crashed in the Great Salt Lake, hadn’t hurt his chances for entrance to Test Pilot School either. The general had told him, “I’ll get you anything you want,” when Gould plucked CINCSTRAT from the water.

So here he was. Number-one honcho on the TAV circuit and being held up on the flight line by some lard-ass, non-rated colonel. Why on earth they’d put a nonpilot in charge of the Flight Test Center still puzzled him. The “new air force” had certainly gone to pot.

He squinted through the heat toward Base Ops. Still nothing. The motorcade from maintenance was nowhere in sight.

As he scowled he heard the sound of feet hitting the ground. He wiped a small bead of perspiration that began to gather at his lip and jerked his head toward Base Ops. He said, “It’ll be a while yet; looks like the debrief is going to be delayed.”

Major Delores Beckman rolled her eyes and leaned against the side of the TAV. Her orange flight suit contrasted with the blackened camouflage painted on the TAV. The camouflage was a compromise settled on by the various generals on the air staff. Exhaustive studies had shown it didn’t matter
what
you painted on the aircraft; as it turned out, the enemy would either detect the plane by radar or from the glint off the windshield, so it really didn’t make any difference. The camouflage was the result of a two-year pissing contest among the generals, a compromise struck so that no one would lose face.

Delores crossed her arms over her breasts. “Command Post still insists we stay put until maintenance does their thing. They promised it would be only a few more minutes. Do you want me to go ahead with the post flight?”

“Sure, I’ll grab the front if you get the back.”

“Right.”

Delores sashayed away, the flight suit swaying slightly at the hips—tight around the buttocks, but sagging around the waist, not complimenting her at all.

Gould shook his head slightly, thinking to himself, I’ve seen worse. Delores perplexed him. Not only was she one of the few women at Edwards that he had failed to get to bed, but she was a superb pilot. It just didn’t seem right: Hot pilots
have
to be hot in bed, but from all indications, she was not playing the game at all. He tried to take her out a couple of times in the month she’d been there, but she’d let him know in no uncertain terms that they were playing by
her
rules.

As a flight examiner, he was in a position to force her hand—flunk her on a check ride in one of the TAV’s—but he was better than that. He didn’t need to fall back on some hooked-up position of flight examiner to get what he wanted. And if she was going to play the game that way—well, he thought, we’ll just see, Miss Delores Beckman—you may be a red-hot pilot, but you’re not going to mess with my head. No ma’am. I’ll play your game and win.

Gould yanked the checklist out of a zipped top pocket and strode around the front of the TAV. He checked off items as he came to them, ensuring the craft had not sustained damage from its semi ballistic flight.

He was at the next-to-last item on the checklist when he heard an approaching vehicle. He hastily looked over a pitot tube and the VUHF antenna before scrambling under the TAV’s fuselage to greet two staff cars, a SMART maintenance truck, and a bus that served as the crew van.

A chubby colonel, his blue short-sleeved uniform shirt untucked in the back and a paunch bulging over his belt, nodded a greeting to Gould. “How ya doing, Major?”

“Fine, sir.” Gould straightened slightly and halfway forced a salute.

Colonel Mathin ignored the salute and walked around the TAV, staring up at the scorched fuselage. The craft still emanated heat from its reentry, but it had quickly cooled in the dry air. He patted the low-slung vessel and turned to Gould. “We’re taking her off flight status until we can get her completely checked out. I don’t want any of the other birds to go up until we find the glitch you reported. Which flight controls were you having trouble with?”

Delores appeared behind Gould and held out a notepad. The colonel grunted a greeting to Delores, ripped the top form off the pad, and studied it. He spoke to no one in particular: “Pitch thrusters.” Then, looking up at Gould, he said, “I would have thought you had trouble with the new JATO units we installed. There hasn’t been any trouble with the pitch thrusters since we upgraded them last year. What happened?”

“Well, it wasn’t me, sir—I was the examiner on the flight. Major Beckman was AC. She noticed the sluggish response once we were entering the atmosphere.” He turned to Delores. “Do you want to fill him in?”

“That’s right, Colonel. We were rounding the top, about one-fifty clicks up, when I couldn’t get a nose-down attitude.”

Colonel Mathin looked at her from the corner of his eye. “That’s serious. Why didn’t you declare an emergency?”

“Didn’t have time. I rotated the TAV using the roll thrusters, tweaked the yaws to get us pointing to the right—which was actually “down” by that time—then rolled us around again with the thrusters to get the right attitude.”

The colonel raised his brows. Gould smiled, wiping the grin from his face as the colonel looked his way. Colonel Mathin said to Gould, “Well, are you going to override her and declare an emergency, Major, or what?”

Gould thought for a minute. “How long will the TAVs be in the shop, Colonel?”

“For an emergency, we’ll have to ground the fleet. No telling how long we’d have to keep them there. But if you don’t override her by declaring an emergency, we can only ground
this
bird until the problem is fixed. Then it’s free to fly again, even if every TAV in the inventory has the same problem. You know the rules, Major.”

Damn bureaucracy, thought Gould. Shut down the whole friggin’ operation for nothing more than probably a blown fuse. He ran a hand through his hair. “Major Beckman passed her check ride, Colonel. Once she regained control of the TAV there was no need to declare an emergency. I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can add to her report.”

Mathin reddened. “Very well, Major, but it will be your butt if this happens again.” He nodded curtly to the two and spun around, barking orders to the gaggle of maintenance personnel who had congregated around the trio during their discussion.

The SMART truck pulled up to the TAV. An airman ran out and attached a wire from the truck to the craft, grounding the TAV by bringing it to the same electric potential as the truck, circumventing any chance of having a spark arc during the maintenance and subsequent refueling.

Gould pulled his flight briefcase out of the hatch and made his way to the crew van that had pulled up alongside the TAV. Delores caught up with him as he entered the van and signaled with her eyes for him to join her in the back. Gould scooted into the back seat; Delores sat in front of him, turning around to face him as the van started up.

“Thanks.”

He shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”

“They would have taken me off flight status until the emergency was investigated. And with the shortage of maintenance personnel, it might have been months before the incident was cleared up.”

“You passed the check ride, so you didn’t have anything to worry about. The emergency, if there was one, was entirely a judgment call. Look, Delores, this isn’t UPT. We’re not quite as Mickey-Mouse as ATC out here, but you’ve still got to cover your six. If you screw the pooch up there and don’t execute successfully, you’re gone. Period. No questions asked.

“But on the other hand, if you jump the gun, like calling an emergency too early and the emergency
doesn’t
pan out, then that’s just as good as messing up. Colonel Mathin will transfer you out of here so fast your head will spin. He can’t afford to have TAV pilots who are too timid to put their life on the line. But he also can’t afford to have TAV pilots who end up killing themselves. You have to toe a fine line flying these babies. And today it looks like you passed the first test.” Gould sat back in the seat and stared out the van window.

Delores was quiet for some time before saying, “Uh, thanks.…” Her voice trailed off.

He just nodded. “Don’t worry. Now that you’ve qualified on the TAV you’ll start pulling alert with the rest of us soon enough. I guarantee you’ll be bored stiff after the first week of waiting around.”

The White House, Washington, D.C.

“Mr. President, I really think you ought to reconsider. If you go on this trip without stopping in the UK, it would be a slap in the face to their Labor Party. Especially when you consider the campaign support they gave you.” The White House chief of staff, Manuel Baca, stood rigidly in front of President Montoya’s desk.

Sandoval Montoya—forty-sixth President of the United States of America, youngest son of Ronaldo Montoya, and father of three daughters—sat unyielding and scowled. In the two years of his presidency, Baca, his chief of staff, had buffered him to an unheard-of extent. Slowly but surely President Montoya was beginning to feel his power erode.

He no longer made decisions; instead, he
reacted
to recommendations. Recommendations that were brought in by his chief of staff and sanitized into something that Montoya would think was acceptable. And it wasn’t just here, in the Oval Office. It was everything in his life—even Rosanna had the girls present their plans to him like an over studied, overstaffed GAO behemoth. He couldn’t return home to Santa Fe without his itinerary being inspected throughout the bureaucracy.

Well, it just
wasn’t
acceptable! He tapped his fingertips together and spoke quietly. Honed to perfection while he was governor of New Mexico, it was the little power game he played that forced people to listen. And once he had them straining to hear what he was saying, he had them.

“Manuel”—he drew out the vowels—“we have to remember why we’re going; I just don’t have time to stop in the UK.” He counted off points on his fingers. “One, the Brits don’t really care if we show up or not. They’ve got their own supply of oil, so what we do doesn’t matter to them anymore. The Labor Party is such a small minority in Parliament that it wouldn’t make any difference if we gave them Texas; they’d still buy oil on the open market.

“Two, I’ve gone over two years in a row. I’ve got to appease both Russia and Israel. If I don’t, I’ll lose any influence I have left.

“Three, Israel’s going to fall, and soon, if we don’t pump that money into their economy. The Arab Liberated Hegemony is poised on their borders with everything but the kitchen sink. All the ALH is looking for is an excuse to attack. And if we treat Israel the same way we did Mexico, we’re going to lose a lot of damned fine people.”

Baca stared at Montoya, incredulous. “But Mr. President, you yourself know how touchy that would be—remember why you were elected. And keep Mexico out of this. If you try to equate the Israeli situation to what happened to Mexico, it’s over for you.”

Yes, I remember
, thought Montoya.
If it wasn’t for the widespread sympathy to “Let Mexicans Rule Mexico,” I wouldn’t be here now
.

After Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama had been “liberated,” the American public started to get alarmed only when the rebellion in Mexico had reared its ugly head. But as before, the well-orchestrated propaganda from the revolutionary-left presented the United States the slogan: “Let Mexicans Rule Mexico!”

Years of bigotry—treating Mexicans as “little brown brothers from the South”—and uncontrolled corporate greed had fueled the sentiment that the United States should leave well enough alone. The epidemic reached proportions unheard of in the past, outsoaring the anti-American sentiments reverberating from the rest of Latin America. And as a result, once the flow of émigrés started flooding the southern U.S., many Americans openly defied the new immigration policy. Quarter was given to any illegal alien, and support for this activity was openly sanctioned.