Strike Eagle

Strike Eagle Read Free Page B

Book: Strike Eagle Read Free
Author: Doug Beason
Tags: Fiction, General
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during PC exercises, so that could be explained … even though seventeen dead men was an unusually high number.
    What the PC commander didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
    ***

Chapter 1
    Friday, 1 June
    Clark Air Base
Republic of the Philippine Islands
    Clear and minus thirty degrees outside the cockpit window, thirty-five thousand feet above the ocean. Blue sky diffused into a mottled green where the jungle lay on the horizon. Five miles below them the Pacific Ocean looked like tiny ripples on a broad landscape of blue-green flatness, the clouds fluffy wisps. Strung out over a three-mile line flew five aircraft, four of them fighters, following a lumbering KC-10.
    First Lieutenant Bruce Steele craned his neck around the cockpit of his aging F-15E Strike Eagle. It may have been one of the oldest fighters in the inventory, but it still packed more punch on air-to-ground than the F-22 and F-35 combined.
    Miniature color TV monitors were inlaid next to switches, buttons, and other instruments on the crowded cockpit panel. A heads-up display jutted up directly in front of him. Cockpit gray clashed against the rest of the color-filled outside world. He felt like he was flying a high-tech video game.
    Bruce spotted the other aircraft by their contrails, dense white plumes of water vapor spewed from the engines. Just visible two hundred miles in front of him rose a volcanic hill, protruding thousands of feet above the surrounding jungle but still miles beneath the fighters. A voice came over his headphones.
    “Maddog, Lead. Estimate ‘feet dry’ in twenty miles. Prepare to descend. Remain in loose route.”
    Bruce squinted out the cockpit to where the ocean ended. The “feet dry” warning confirmed Bruce’s estimate that they’d soon fly over land. His helmet filled with the sounds of the other fighters confirming his orders. One after another the clipped replies came:
    “Two.”
    “Three.”
    Bruce clicked his mike. “Four.”
    The lead aircraft kicked off a message to the Air Force version of the giant DC-10, the KC-10 tanker that had escorted them across the “pond,” as the Pacific Ocean was affectionately called. The dual-seated F-15E had a cruising range of more than twenty-eight hundred miles and could certainly make the hop over part of the pond—from Anderson AFB in Guam, where they had left some eight hours ago.
    But Murphy’s Law reigned supreme in the Air Force: if something was going to go wrong, then it usually did. So rather than have the fighters cross the long stretch of deep water alone, a KC-10 tanker accompanied the crafts and kept them refueled.
    As the flight began to descend from its cruising altitude, Bruce heard the voice of his navigator and backseater, Charlie Fargassa.
    “I got a lock on the TACAN, ’sassin.” Charlie pronounced Bruce’s call sign “Assassin” in two syllables.
    Bruce went “hot-mike”: he flipped the mike to transmit within the fighter only. “That’s a rog. Ready to stretch those legs?”
    “You said it. I could piss for a week.”
    Bruce grinned. For the last eight hours he had been forced to use a “piddle pack” to urinate. Besides being inconvenient and uncomfortable, the device made Bruce nervous—he didn’t like the possibility of loose liquid in the cockpit.
    Charlie was another matter. The older man—by all of six years—refused to use the piddle pack, and instead opted to grit his teeth and bear it. When the Wing Commander back at Luke Air Force Base had made the equipment mandatory, Charlie steadfastly refused to be “plugged in.”
    Charlie needed a little needling, just to drive the point home. “Twenty more minutes. Can you handle it, Foggy?”
    Again, silence. Then weakly, “That’s a rog, Assassin.”
    Bruce nearly gagged trying not to laugh. It felt good to be heading into a new place, a new environment. Damn good.
    Bruce was on top of the world. And passing through thirty thousand feet, that was literally true.
    He absently rubbed his

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