Operator B Read online

  The pretty colonel, Ashton, stood up from her chair. “Well, General, it comes on very good authority that you’re the best pilot in the world.”

  “Are you?” Rainier asked.

  Wentz didn’t like this kind of spotlight. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve probably got more black test flights than any one else. But there are plenty of guys out there who are top-notch.”

  “Top notch isn’t good enough,” Smith said.

  Then Rainier: “If you’re not the best, then who is?”

  It didn’t come easy, but Wentz put his ego aside. “Will Farrington,” he admitted.

  “You’ve flown with General Farrington?” Rainier asked.

  “Well, no, sir. He was Marine Corp,” Wentz said, “and what I heard was he retired as a colonel O-6.”

  Ashton again: “What do you know about Farrington?”

  It was a difficult question to answer or to even contemplate. Like asking a World War I vet about Sergeant York or the French Foreign Legion in Indochina. Farrington was a myth, a legend within the secret circle of classified aviation. Any pilot who ever saw Farrington fly would never forget it. They said that on their deathbeds, the last thought in any woman’s mind would be the first man she’d made love to.

  With black-op pilots, the last thought in your head would the time you saw Farrington fly…

  “He was the best test in the business, bar none,” Wentz said. “No one could touch him. When he grabbed the stick, he became part of the aircraft. In 1984 I saw him pull a barrel roll in a C-141. This guy could fly cargo planes like they were fighters, and he could pull Immelmann Turns in helicopters. In Vietnam he brought down sixteen MIGs in a Douglas Skyraider, guns only… There was a war correspondent in Hue who actually filmed Farrington in his Skyraider—a propeller-driven plane—shooting down four jet-powered MIGs like they were slow skeet—not with air-to-air missiles, with mounted guns. First day in test-pilot school, they show that film. Will Farrington was astounding. Kind of like everybody’s icon, the pilot’s pilot. He was the King Zeus of black-op flyers and restricted test pilots.”

  “What became of him?” inquired Smith. “Do you know? Did you ever hear any rumors?”

  “He disappeared in 88,” Wentz said. “Word is he retired and became a recluse; they said he burned out. Didn’t make sense for a driver that good to retire.”

  “That’s because he didn’t retire, General,” Smith informed. “He’s been working for us since then, on a very classified project.”

  Wentz peered at Smith, then at Rainier. “You want me to work with Will Farrington?”

  “Would that change your mind about retiring?” Rainier asked.

  These goddamn people kill me, Wentz thought.

  “No.”

  General Rainier and Smith traded narrow glances.

  “That’s not quite it,” Rainier continued. “What we want, Wentz, is for you to pick up where Farrington left off.”

  Wentz didn’t know if he felt more puzzled than pissed off. “I don’t get it, sir.”

  General Rainier leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Farrington committed suicide several nights ago. We was clinically depressed because—well, we think he lacked the confidence to undertake his current mission. We want you to consider that mission.”

  Wentz felt floored. Suddenly a whirlwind of questions rose, all bidden by his pilot’s propensities and the instincts formed over the last twenty-five years of sitting in classified cockpits. What “mission” could possibly daunt a flyer the likes of Will Farrington? What mission would cause the best pilot in the world—and in aviation history—to kill himself?

  Part of Wentz found the notion unfathomable…but it also hooked him.

  If Farrington couldn’t hack the mission…maybe I can, he tempted himself

  But then the reality swept back down, the promises he’d made, and not just those to Joyce and Pete but those to himself.

  “I can’t, sir,” he said. “I can’t do it.”

  “Scared? Ain’t got the nuts?”

  Wentz uttered the most irreducible chuckle. He knew what he wanted to say in response, thought about all the reasons why he shouldn’t, but then said it anyway.

  “Fuck yourself, sir.”

  Ashton and Smith went rigid.

  Wentz tossed a shoulder. “That’s right, I just told a four-star general to fuck himself.” He shot his gaze across the room. “You haul me away from my family with all this crypto spookshow bullshit and have the audacity to insult me with mind-game challenges that wouldn’t work on a high school kid?” Wentz pointed at General Rainier. “If you think I’m scared, if you think I ain’t got the nuts—try sitting in one of my chairs one motherfucking day, General. Try test-flying a plane with reverse-angle wings where even the goddamn designers don’t know if it’ll fly for more than fifteen seconds before falling apart. Try flying six hundred and fifty knots at an altitude of twenty feet in the dark, just to drop a single laze marker and knowing if you hit a tree or a powerline, a couple of hundred grunts are gonna die along with yourself. Try that, sir. You and your kind get carted around in an Air Force limo; you’ve probably got a master sergeant to hold your dick for you when you piss. Try pissing your pants in a ramjet when the systems light goes off, when you’ve got two choices, you can eject and drop your plane in a residential neighborhood and wipe out a block, or you can try to glide fifty miles to the water and flop a hundred million bucks in the drink when you know you’ve only got one chance in ten of surviving the impact. I did that once. So, I repeat, sir. Fuck yourself.”

  Wentz had expended his rant, and probably his honorable discharge. Fuck it, he thought.

  Ashton and Smith stood wide-eyed in shock. Rainier strummed his fingers on the desk.

  “I don’t like to be played with,” Wentz said to the silent room. Then, to Rainier, “Go ahead and demote me to basic airman. See if I give a shit.”

  “This isn’t about that,” Rainier said, unperturbed. “This isn’t about protocol or UCMJ or rank or who’s the top cat. Christ, I wish more men had the balls to talk to me like you just did. The reason you’re here isn’t about any of that Air Force bullshit.”

  “What is it about then?”

  “Total duty, total service to one’s country.”

  Wentz ground his teeth until he could taste the metal in his fillings. “For twenty-five fuckin’ years, I’ve served my country like a waiter, and I never even asked for a tip. Remember the Gulf War, the CNN shot of the Paveway II laser-guided bomb swerving into a single window on a sixteen-story office building? That was me. I took out Iraq’s Office of Tactical Air Command, and after flying so low to make the hit, my plane got punched through by so much triple-A my wings were whistling. I couldn’t even make it back to the base at Jiddah; I had to eject over the Gulf… Two hours after Air-Sea Rescue picked me up, I was flying another sortie. So don’t tell me about duty. Don’t tell me about service… Sir.”

  “I would never presume to,” Rainier’s voice grated. “We know all about your feats. We know all about the many times you’ve risked your life for your country. And that’s the reason you’re here instead of some other cocky flyboy. You’re the best. We need the best.”

  Smith stepped forward, holding classified evaluation reports. “Our performance indexes are processed through every personnel computer in the United States military, the CIA, and NASA. You were quite right. General Willard Farrington was the best pilot in the world. But now he’s gone. Which means that you are now the best pilot in the world.”

  Shit, Wentz thought.

  Rainier offered a minuscule smile, stroking his beardless chin. “It’s unlike any mission you could ever imagine.”

  “I can’t take it,” Wentz insisted. “It doesn’t matter. I’m retiring tomorrow. I promised my ex-wife and kid.”

  “Don’t you at least want to know what the mission is?”

  Wentz felt his fingernails scraping his palms. “No, because if you tell me, then I’ll just be that mu
ch more tempted to take it.”

  Rainier eyed Smith and Ashton, cocked a brow. “A proposition, then. I won’t tell you. Check it out for yourself.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Wentz asked.

  “Fly out to Nellis, right now, with Colonel Ashton. Assess the mission. If you don’t want it, that’s fine. We’ll get someone else, and I give you my personal guarantee that you’ll be back here tomorrow by noon to attend your retirement ceremony.”

  Wentz gnawed his lower lip. “Putting it that way makes it damn hard to pass up, sir.”

  “All we’re asking is that you investigate the mission and its details first-hand, General,” Smith stepped back in.

  “And if I don’t like it, I walk?”

  “Absolutely, sir. We’ll fly you straight back to this base and you can officially retire. Beyond that, the only thing we’d ask of you is perhaps a list of other qualified candidates, men you’ve personally known who you feel might be able to assume the mission’s requirements.”

  Wentz’s resolve began to bow, then it collapsed altogether. He rationalized, of course, manipulated the proposition around his promise like a sculptor covering up a flaw with a last-minute slap of clay.

  He wasn’t going to accept the mission…

  I’m just going to check it out. What’s the harm in that?

  “All right,” Wentz agreed.

  “Outstanding,” Rainier said. “Squared away.”

  Wentz came to attention, saluted but Rainier just waved a lazy hand. “I told you, forget about all that. If I have to return one more salute, my goddamn arm’s going to fall off. Colonel Ashton?”

  The woman moved forward, a perfumed shadow. “Get your flight gear on, General Wentz. There’s an F-15 waiting for us on Taxiway Six. On afterburners, we should be in Nevada in about fifty minutes.”

  Wentz scoffed. “With me flying? Try forty.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Static crackled on the headset. “Romeo One this is Boxcars One. Request permission to…” Wentz paused. Why should he care about proper commo protocol anymore? “Request permission to open this fucker up to the max and get the fuck out of here.”

  A chuckle through the static. “Permission affirmed, Boxcars One. You are clear for take-off. When you melt the runway, we’ll send you a bill.”

  “Good luck making me pay, Romeo One. Adios…”

  Taking off on afterburners was close to impossible—but not for Wentz. You just had to know how to jink the throttle in tandem with the azimuth. The $40,000,000 plane didn’t take off as much as it exploded off T-D Runway 4. Wentz wasn’t fifty feet off the asphalt when he pulled into a full barrel-spin and was burning upward at nearly a forty-five-degree line. They were a cockscrew soaring straight up.

  Wentz watched the heavens revolve in the polycarb canopy: the world was a bright spinning top. Ashton shrieked like a cat on fire.

  “Stop it! Stop it! I’m going to—”

  Wentz leveled off with a single quick jerk of the stick. In one second, the plane was flying flat and smooth, roaring westward, the sun beaming above the sky.

  He could hear Ashton gasping in his commo set. “You okay, Colonel?”

  A few more gasps, then the otherwise reserved Colonel Ashton shouted, “Look, I’m not into this fighter-jock macho crap, damn you! Fly the plane normal!”

  “I thought that’s what I was doing,” Wentz miked back to her. “Tighten your stomach muscles. I’ll show you normal.” More finesse on the stick, and the plane’s wings were perpendicular to the earth as he pulled into a 4-G climb.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” she shrieked. “Please!”

  Guess it’s time to stop being a dickhead, Wentz considered. He leveled off again. “I’m sorry, Colonel. I just thought you’d want to experience an official takeoff record. We just climbed to 58,000 feet in one minute. That’s a record for this aircraft. Now you’ve got something to tell your grandkids.”

  Ashton sat behind Wentz, in what would otherwise be the Bear’s Seat, or the EWO seat—electronic warfare officer. This F-15M2-series was a courier version: minimal AV bay, no ECM pod, no General Electric M61 gun. It was stripped, in other words, all business. Two seats sitting on top of two modified Pratt-Whitney dual-shaft turbofans rated 40,000 pounds of zero-mean thrust apiece. The fuel-burn-rating was classified, and so was the plane’s top speed: mach three-point-one. The only thing that struck him as odd was the paint scheme: flat Khaki paint, solid, like the color of sand.

  “I almost…peed myself!” Ashton shouted through her mike. “I don’t care if you’re the best pilot in the world! Don’t do anymore of that shit!”

  Wentz winced at the word. “Colonel? If I may make a personal observation? Somehow, hearing the word shit come out of your mouth…well, it doesn’t become you.”

  “Fuck off!”

  Neither does that, Wentz thought. “I apologize, Colonel. I’m just having a little last-minute fun. After tomorrow, I’ll never be flying this fast again.”

  An exhalation over the wire somehow sounded coy. “Still don’t think you’ll take the mission?”

  “Positive. Rainier was playing me for a fool, so I thought I’d return the favor. Thought I’d take the opportunity to drive an Eagle one more time, at his expense. Whatever this mission is, I ain’t taking it.”

  The coyness left her voice. Now she sounded dead serious. “Don’t be too sure.”

  Wentz cut his afterburners when the temp needle was about to max. “All right, let’s forget about keeping a jackass in suspense. Tell me the mission.”

  “No way, sir. You need to see for yourself, just like General Rainier said.”

  “Eee-haw, eee-haw,” Wentz said. “And by the way, what’s with the funky paint on the plane?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Great answer. “Okay, but if you don’t mind my asking, what’s an… attractive… woman like you doing in all this super-secret classified security clearance bullshit?”

  “You know something, General? Even Farrington wasn’t as sexist as you.”

  “Sexist!” Wentz objected. “Where’d that come from?”

  “Most of you guys? Jesus. Because you’re so maladjusted and unsocialized, you pull these macho big-stud pilot antics. You think that turns a woman on. You think women melt when they see a hardline test pilot in uniform. Well, let me tell you something, General. I’ve met a lot of pilots in this business, and every single one of them has been an egotistical self-absorbed high-on-himself asshole.”

  Wentz chuckled. “Then I’m glad I haven’t disappointed you, Colonel.”

  “Boxcars One, this is Romeo One. Do you read?”

  “Roger,” Wentz answered. “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem, Boxcars One. We just wanted to let you know that our planar-array WLR confirms that you just set an official climb record for an aircraft of your designated thrust-rating.”

  “Roger, Romeo One. Tell me something I don’t already know. Boxcars One, out.” Wentz smiled. “See?” he miked back to Ashton. “I told you.”

  “I’m not terribly impressed, General,” Ashton shot back. “And what’s with the ‘Boxcars?’ Isn’t that a symbol of ill omen?”

  “Sure,” Wentz said. “Every time I land a plane, I expect to die, and I always pick a call-sign that’s bad luck. Widow-maker, Plane Thirteen, Lockheed Casket Company, stuff like that. When I flew the Aurora, my call-sign was Dead Man One. It appeases the fates. It nullifies bad luck by giving reverence to it—it’s pilot stuff. We call it The Nix. If you don’t worship The Nix…you’re spam in a can. There won’t be enough left of you for an E-2 crash technician to scrape out of the cockpit with a spatula.”

  “The Nix, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another coy silence, then Ashton’s voice lowered. “You might need a lot more than The Nix to save you now.”

  “Think so? We’ll see. I already told you, I’m not taking the mission, whatever it is.”

  Silence.

  Then, “O
h, you’ll take it, General,” Ashton said. “I guarantee you’ll take it.”

  Wentz laughed out lout in his mask. “Keep dreaming, lady! I’m just here for the stick time…”

  ««—»»

  Fifteen minutes later, Wentz keyed his mike. “We’re coming up.”

  “All right, General,” Ashton replied. “Slight change of destination. We’re not really going to Nellis.”

  “What? So where are we going? Tasty-Freeze?”

  “Proceed past Nellis Main Runway 3 to Papoose Lake, seventy-five miles west, southwest.”

  Alarmed, Wentz jerked his head around to look at her. “Papoose Lake? That’s a priority no-fly perimeter! I can’t land there!”

  Ashton passed forward another plastic envelope. Wentz tore it open and removed a card that read:

  4B6: PILOT - (SI) TEKNA/BYMAN/ULTIMA

  - COMMAND ORDER -