But this was also a situation in which a fast ride was preferable to a safe one. For that matter, the Turks – one of the last major users of the F-104 in several variants – hadn’t had nearly the problem with crashes that others, particularly the Luftwaffe, had experienced. West German maintenance was notoriously slipshod, and the F-104 simply didn’t tolerate mistakes.
That wasn’t an attitude Kelly could object to, even in a piece of hardware; and anyway, like he’d told the colonel behind him, it was the deal he’d been handed this time.
Turkish ground crewmen helped Kelly up the narrow steps to the rear seat in the cockpit. They grinned and gestured to point out the warning arrows setting off the jet intake. The rushing whine of air to the turbine would have overwhelmed human speech.
Kelly dumped himself into the seat behind the pilot. He flew enough that he sometimes thought he’d spent five years of his life in airplanes; but he was strictly a passenger, with neither knowledge nor interest in the sort of thing that happened in the cockpit. That included, he began to realize, matters like where to put his feet, and how to buckle himself into the ejection seat, which he supposed included a parachute.
The pilot – Turkish or American? – didn’t care any more about Kelly’s problems than Kelly would have had their positions been reversed. As soon as the passenger dropped into the cockpit, the TF-104G’s brakes released with a jerk and the aircraft slid out of its revetment on the narrow undercarriage splaying from its fuselage. The wings were too thin to conceal a tire.
The cockpit canopy closed smoothly, bringing blessed relief from the howl of the jet being reflected from the berm. Kelly found the oxygen mask and fitted it while the right brake and the delicate, steerable nosewheel aligned the aircraft with the runway. There had been a minimum of rollout; this was a combat installation, not a commercial operation handcuffed by the need to serve thousands of passengers.
There was probably a connection for the radio leads dangling from his helmet, the veteran thought while the turbojet shrieked and shuddered as the pilot wound it out. Then acceleration punched him back into a seat which seemed remarkably uncomfortable.
The hell with the radio, Kelly thought as the needle nose lifted and the Earth fell away so sharply that he had nothing with which to compare the sight.
It occurred to him, however, that this was only a foretaste of what awaited him in El Paso if things worked out the way he had planned.
He also found himself thinking that the F-104, even at its worst, had never approached the hundred-percent failure rate that the monocle ferry held to date.
Knowing that he was still in Turkey, Kelly could have told from the air that they were over Incirlik Airbase by the planes deployed on the ground: C-141 Starlifters and a flight of F-15’s. Incirlik had no home squadron of its own, but it was American-staffed and trained, in rotation, all the US tactical wings based in Europe. Turkey herself could afford neither the big cargo aircraft nor state-of-the-art fighters like the F-15. Despite that, the performance of Kelly’s pilot and his aging F-104, without notice and on a nontasked mission, suggested that the Turkish Air Force would hold up its end just fine if it came to a crunch.
They touched down firmly, jarring off knots, and the thump and shock that lifted their nose again startled Kelly until he realized that a drag chute was deploying behind them. The F-104 slowed abruptly. Presumably in response to instructions from the tower, the pilot braked to a near stop and turned onto a taxiway.
As the cockpit canopies began to rise again, the veteran looked to the side and saw that a car was driving parallel with them, a midsize American station wagon. Well, he couldn’t complain that he wasn’t getting the full treatment. Not red carpet, of course, but he didn’t want red carpet, he wanted functional. If they decided to parachute him out over Fort Bliss instead of landing, he couldn’t rightly complain.