Or almost all. At Cape Canaveral, a Titan-IIID rocket began its final countdown. Three senior Air Force officers and half a dozen civilians watched the hundred or so technicians go through the procedure. They were unhappy. Their cargo had been bumped at the last minute for this less important one (they thought). The explanation for the change was not to their collective satisfaction, and there weren’t enough launch rockets to play this sort of game. But nobody had bothered telling them what the game actually was.
“Tallyho, tallyho. I have eyeballs on target,” Bronco reported. The Eagle bottomed out half a mile astern and slightly below the target. It seemed to be a four-engined Douglas. A DC-4, -6, or -7, a big one-the biggest he’d yet intercepted. Four piston engines and a single rudder made it a Douglas product, certainly older than the man who was now chasing it. Winters saw the blue flames from the exhaust ports on the big radial engines, along with the moonlight shimmering from the propellers. The rest was mainly guesswork.
The flying became harder now. He was closing on the target and had to slough off his airspeed lest he overtake it. Bronco throttled his Pratt & Whitney engines back and put on some flaps to increase both lift and drag as he watched his airspeed drop to a scant two-hundred forty knots.
He matched speed when he was a hundred yards aft of the target. The heavy fighter rocked slightly – only the pilot would have noticed – from the larger plane’s wake turbulence. Time. He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers once around the stick. Captain Winters switched on his powerful landing lights. They were alert, he saw. The wingtips rocked a second after his lights transfixed the former airliner in the sky.
“Aircraft in view, please identify, over,” he called over the guard frequency.
It started turning – it was a DC-7B, he thought now, the last of the great piston-engine liners, so quickly brushed aside by the advent of the jetliners in the late fifties. The exhaust flames grew brighter as the pilot added power.
“Aircraft in view, you are in restricted airspace. Identify immediately, over,” Bronco called next. Immediately is a word that carries a special meaning for flyers.
The DC-7B was diving now, heading for the wave tops. The Eagle followed almost of its own accord.
“Aircraft in view, I repeat – you are in restricted airspace. Identify at once!
Turning away now, heading east for the Florida peninsula. Captain Winters eased back on the stick and armed his gun system. He checked the surface of the ocean to make sure that there were no ships or boats about.
“Aircraft in view, if you do not identify I will open fire, over.” No reaction.
The hard part now was that the Eagle’s gun system, once armed, did everything possible to facilitate the pilot’s task of hitting the target. But they wanted him to bring one in alive, and Bronco had to concentrate to make sure he’d miss, then squeezed the trigger for a fraction of a second.
Half the rounds in the magazine were tracers, and the six-barrel cannon spat them out at a rate of almost a hundred per second. What resulted was a streak of green-yellow light that looked like one of the laser beams in a science-fiction movie, and hung for a sizable portion of infinity a bare ten yards from the DC-7B’s cockpit window.
“Aircraft in view: level out and identify or you’ll eat the next burst. Over.”
“Who is this? What the hell are you doing?” The DC-7B leveled out.
“Identify!” Winters commanded tersely.
“Carib Cargo – we’re a special flight, inbound from Honduras.”
“You are in restricted airspace. Come left to new course three-four-seven.”
“Look, we didn’t know about the restriction. Tell us where to go and we’re out of here, okay? Over.”
“Come left to three-four-seven. I will be following you in. You got some big-league explaining to do, Carib. You picked a bad place to be flying without lights. I hope you got a good story, ’cause the colonel is not pleased with you. Bring that fat-assed bird left – now!”
Nothing happened for a moment. Bronco was a little bit peeved that they were not taking him seriously enough. He eased his fighter over to the right and triggered off another burst to encourage the target.
And it came left to a heading of three-four-seven. And the anticollision lights came on.
“Okay, Carib, maintain course and altitude. Stay off your radio. I repeat, maintain radio silence until instructed otherwise. Don’t make it any worse than it already is. I’ll be back here to keep an eye on you. Out.”
It took nearly an hour – each second like driving a Ferrari in Manhattan rush-hour traffic. Clouds were rolling in from the north, he saw as they approached the coast, and there was lightning in them. They’d land first, Winters thought. On cue, a set of runway lights came on.
“Carib, I want you to land on that strip right in front of you. You do exactly what they tell you. Out.” Bronco checked his fuel state. Enough for several more hours. He indulged himself by throttling up and rocketing to twenty thousand as he watched the DC-7’s strobe lights enter the blue rectangle of the old airstrip.
“Okay, he’s ours,” the radio told the fighter pilot.
Bronco did not acknowledge. He brought the Eagle around for Eglin AFB, and figured that he’d beat the weather in. Another night’s work.
The DC-7B rolled to a stop at the end of the runway. As it halted, a number of lights came on. A jeep rolled to within fifty yards of the aircraft’s nose. On the back of the jeep was an M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, on the left side of which hung a large box of ammunition. The gun was pointed right at the cockpit.
“Out of the fuckin” airplane, amigo!” an angry voice commanded over some loudspeakers.
The forward door opened on the left side of the aircraft. The man who looked down was white and in his forties. Blinded by the lights that were aimed at his face, he was still disoriented. Which was part of the plan, of course.
“Down on the pavement, amigo,” a voice said from behind a light.
“What’s gives? I -”
“Down on the fuckin’ pavement – right the fuck now!”
There were no stairs. The pilot was joined by another man, and one at a time they sat down on the doorsill, and stretched down to hang from their hands, then dropped the four feet or so to the cracked concrete. They were met by strong arms in rolled-up camouflage fatigues.
“Face on the cement, you fuckin’ commie spy!” a young voice screamed at them.
“Hot diggity damn, we finally bagged one!” another voice called. “We got us a fuckin’ Cuban spy plane!”
“What the hell -” one of the men on the cement started to say. He stopped talking when the three-pronged flash suppressor on an M-16 rifle came to rest on the back of his neck. Then he felt a hot breath on the side of his face.
“I want any shit out of you, amigo, I’ll fuckin’ blow it outa ya!” said the other voice. It sounded older than the first one. “Anybody else on the airplane, amigo?”
“No. Look, we’re -”
“Check it out! And watch your ass!” the gunnery sergeant added.
“Aye aye, Gunny,” answered the Marine corporal. “Give me some cover on the door.”
“You got a name?” the gunnery sergeant asked. He punctuated the question by pressing his muzzle into the pilot’s neck.
“Bert Russo. I’m -”
“You picked a bad time to spy on the exercise, Roberto. We was ready for y’all this time, boy! I wonder if Fidel’ll want your ass back… ?”
“He don’t look Cuban to me, Gunny,” a young voice observed. “You s’pose he’s a Russian?”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Russo objected.
“Sure, Roberto. I – over here, Cap’n!” Footsteps approached. And a new voice started talking.
“Sorry I’m late, Gunny Black.”
“We got it under control, sir. Putting people into the plane now. Finally bagged that Cuban snooper, we did. This here’s Roberto. Ain’t talked to the other one yet.”
“Roll him over.”
A rough hand flipped the pilot faceup like a rag doll, and he saw what the hot breath came from. The biggest German Shepherd dog he’d ever seen in his life was staring at him from a distance of three inches. When he looked at it, it started growling.
“Don’t you go scarin’ my dog, Roberto,” Gunnery Sergeant Black warned him unnecessarily.
“You have a name?”
Bert Russo couldn’t see any faces. Everyone was backlit by the perimeter lights. He could see the guns, and the dogs, one of which stood next to his copilot. When he started to speak, the dog over his face moved, and that froze the breath in his throat.