Before – James

The cockpit of the big RC-135 “Rivet Joint” was serene, even comfortable, if you could forget about the dials, switches, and toggles covering literally every available surface.  On station and in level flight, there wasn’t much for a pilot to worry about.  James Calder looked out over a featureless expanse of sea ice and glacier, the curvature of the earth not quite visible on the horizon. 

Apart from the scenery, it was nothing like the supersonic high-altitude jet rides James and his first officer Jon had begun their careers on, packed into G-suits like astronauts in a capsule.  The job, the flying, none of it was what they’d signed on for anymore.  The top-secret program they started in had been officially retired, then cooled down and further down, and finally completely shelved.  Satellite imagery made supersonic reconnaissance obsolete, and James and Jon had been repurposed as pilots.

“The Thule missions,” Jon spoke suddenly.

“The what now?”

“The Thule missions,” he repeated.  “That’s what we’ve been flying, this whole rotation.  You ever hear about those?”

James shook his head, listening.

“I was talking to this old vet, this B-52 driver,” Jon said.  “Back in the Cold War, they’d keep a bomber on permanent airborne station, flying great big circles within constant visual of Thule AFB in Greenland.  Nuclear-armed, the idea being, if the Russkies struck first and the crew ever lost contact with Thule, they would fly directly for predesignated targets.”

James wrinkled his brow.  “No nukes on board.  We’re rigged for intel, and ECM.”

“With telemetry that can vector an orbital nuke onto the left corner of a postage stamp,” Jon reminded him.

“I’ve heard that.  Haven’t seen it happen yet.”

“Beginning to think we never will.  Last dance.” 

“Yes it is.”  James hesitated, then asked, “What’ll you remember most?”

“Vladivostok, 1997,” Jon said immediately.

James nodded, expecting no other possible answer.  After this long, he could still close his eyes and be back in the cockpit of the ‘bird, sweating in the thick g-suit and oxygen mask.  “The Foxhounds,” he said softly.

“They thought they were cute,” Jon said.

“Could’ve been embarrassing.”  James could count on one hand the number of supersonic drivers who’d been fired on, ever.

“Not for us.”

Their predecessors had gone to all kinds of trouble, allowing a near-intercept as pretext for calling off overflights of Russian airspace.  The MiG-25 and MiG-31 both possessed the capability in theory to shoot them down, but the odds had always been comfortably long.  Say, if radar operators on the ground got a solid ID on them a hundred and fifty miles out, the fighters would have about ninety seconds to scramble and get airborne, and then mash their throttle straight up to sixty thousand feet where they might—might—get off a single missile shot from long range, beyond visual, before running out of momentum and fuel.  Not that that missile would be moving much faster than the SR.  James had likened it to a short kid shooting a basketball, but the hoop was thirty feet high, and it wasn’t a basketball but a bowling ball, and they only got one shot.  Plus, redlining that old Soviet pre-titanium steel would warp the airframe on any MiG that tried it, not to mention destroy an expensive engine, meaning any challengers that stepped up would have been lucky to land, much less ever fly again.

They never got a visual on the Foxhound that fired something very new and very fast at them, in 1997.  He’d been watching the curvature of the Earth and waiting for the sun to rise in the west as they outpaced the planet’s rotation; it was a sight not many could claim.  The horizon was still more a shimmering band than a clear demarcation, but, wow: it had that bend to it.  At nearly twenty miles high, the twin J85s pushed astonishingly efficiently through the minimal atmosphere, cones set to funnel and ride the supersonic shock waves back through the cowl.  James knew the air outside was far below freezing, but a pleasant warmth emanated from the thick windows, where he knew the friction-grabbing rivets in the airframe were glowing orange.

“Hold on,” Jon had spoken up from his RIO seat in back.

“Hold on?” James repeated, amused.  “You want me to pull over?”

“I’ve got a bogey,” he said.  “Thirty thousand feet and incoming.”

“Think we can disregard.”

“Not with that rate of climb.  We have a concern here.”  Jon sucked in his breath sharply.  “Eleven o’clock low,” he said.  “Thar she blows.”

Sure enough, James looked off to the left, and just below the horizon blur, a pinprick burned at the top of a white column.  “Just the one?” he breathed. 

“Affirm,” Jon said.  “We have a missile on intercept course.  Recommend evasive action.”

“Sure,” James replied.  “Stand by to light this puppy up.”  Evasive action consisted of going faster.  Topping out officially around mach 3.3, the fastest missile fired at them, in theory, would lose angle for an intercept course quickly.  The big engines made a sound like clearing their throats and he felt an acceleration.  Out both windows, leading surfaces on the airframe began to glow more intensely.

“Closing,” Jon stated.  “Giving it a real broad signature right now.”

James could envision the missile clearly, the size and shape of a telephone pole on fire, bending its course serenely toward theirs.

“Let me get around,” James said.  “Show it our tail.”

And the big ‘bird seemed to stretch, waking up as he rolled on throttle.  The missile would be tracking behind them now, with all the heat signature it wanted but nowhere near the velocity to catch up.  “We happy yet?”

“Closing,” Jon repeated tersely.

“What?!  Another?”

“Same.  Calling one thousand meters aft and closing.”

“This is bullshit,” James grumbled.  “Stand by for full burn.”  In no time, the jets were flaring at maximum rated thrust.  He didn’t trust instrumentation anymore, but by any ground speed they could be pushing Mach 4.

“Closing.”

James hesitated, flicked a bypass, and engaged the throttles more fully.  A shimmy developed in the airframe, and he waited for it to pass.

“Eight hundred meters and closing.”

James cursed and pushed both throttles to their stops.  The jolt and rattle was noticeable, like he’d suddenly swerved a car off the paved road onto rocky ground.  The plane clunked and bumped, developing a rhythm like shoes in a washing machine.

“Now?” he demanded.

“Steady,” Jon called.  It sounded as if he were trying to hold on to something.

“Steady!?  What the hell are we running from here?” he demanded, choking around a knot of fear in his throat.

“Seven hundred meters,” Jon called in a choked voice.  “Closing.  We’re not beating it on the flat.”

“Shit shit shit,” James breathed.  If they weren’t losing the missile at full power in level flight, that narrowed their options.  “Altitude?” he asked Jon.

“You wanna be an astronaut?” came the answer.  “Or a meteorite?”

The pitch wheel floated beneath his finger.  One direction would push the limits of the atmosphere, and would be betting they were more rocket than the missile behind them, with its finite fuel supply.  The other would outrun anything made, if they could survive it.

“We already came through seventy-five, we don’t have the climb profile to—”

“Copy that,” James said.  Grimly he eased the pitch wheel forward.  The horizon line rose past his clouded portholes.  The ship bucked and fought him as he pushed the nose further down, power-diving at over four times the speed of sound with the combined forces of gravity and both J85s fully unleashed.

“Falling off!” Jon called.  “One thousand meters!  Fifteen hundred—no longer tracking!”

James was aware of a cold layer of oily sweat inside his pressure suit.  Jon asked as if from far away if they could clear this fucking turbulence now, and James felt it too, a cyclic pulling, like driving with a flat tire, through a pulsing wall of red as he fiddled the pitch wheel with numb fingers, incurring momentarily more Gs than his pressure suit could keep up with.  He tried to remember, keep it gentle, this wasn’t a maneuverable fighter jet, and the big chines that gave them lift at altitude would make them sluggish and slow to respond now.  His head and wrists felt so heavy he could hold nothing up at all, and he thought, muscle memory, wondering if it ever worked that way, and whether he could keep easing the ship’s nose up as he slowly blacked out.

Then the fog cleared, and they were level again, or nearly so, the tail slewing and yawing, the ship bleeding off airspeed, slowing coming back to his control.

He’d never told anyone but Jon how nearly he had almost killed them both on that day, how close he’d been to just succumbing to the weight and nodding off and cratering them into the tundra.  “I was never worried,” Jon had claimed brashly, “But still—g’job not burning us in.”

It wasn’t the kind of story he told Sonja, even then.  Their official debriefing had stuck to objective details, ascertaining validity of threat in proportion to evasive measures; fear never came into those assessments, ever, as an unspoken rule.  He’d confessed it only to Jon, who had trusted him still, flown with him anyway.  They didn’t make a card in the Hallmark aisle for that.