2034: A Novel of the Next World War(2)
This elusive it, which had held four generations of Mitchells in its thrall, was the sensation of flying by the seat of your pants, on pure instinct alone. (Back when I flew with Pappy, and we’d be on patrol, it wasn’t all whizbang like you have it now. No targeting computers. No autopilot. It was just your skill, your controls, and your luck. We’d mark our gunsights on the canopy with a grease pencil and off we’d fly. And when you flew with Pappy you learned pretty quick to watch your horizon. You’d watch it close, but you’d also watch Pappy. When he’d toss his cigarette out of the cockpit and slam his canopy shut, you knew he meant business and you were about to tangle with a flight of Zeros.)
The last time Wedge had heard that little speech from his great-grandfather, he’d been six years old. The sharp-eyed pilot had only the slightest tremor in his voice despite his ninety-plus years. And now, as the clear sun caught light on his canopy, Wedge could hear the words as distinctly as if his great-grandfather were riding along as his back-seater. Except the F-35E Lightning he flew only had a single seat.
This was but one of the many gripes Wedge had with the fighter he was piloting so close to Iranian airspace that he was literally dancing his starboard wing along the border. Not that the maneuver was hard. In fact, flying with such precision took no skill at all. The flight plan had been inputted into the F-35’s onboard navigation computer. Wedge didn’t have to do a thing. The plane flew itself. He merely watched the controls, admired the view out his canopy, and listened to the ghost of his great-grandfather taunting him from a nonexistent back seat.
Jammed behind his headrest was an auxiliary battery unit whose hum seemed impossibly loud, even over the F-35’s turbofan engine. This battery, about the size of a shoebox, powered the latest upgrade to the fighter’s suite of stealth technologies. Wedge hadn’t been told much about the addition, only that it was some kind of an electromagnetic disrupter. Before he’d been briefed on his mission, he’d caught two civilian Lockheed contractors tampering with his plane belowdecks and had alerted the sergeant at arms, who himself had no record of any civilians on the manifest of the George H. W. Bush. This had resulted in a call to the ship’s captain, who eventually resolved the confusion. Due to the sensitivity of the technology being installed, the presence of these contractors was itself highly classified. Ultimately, it proved a messy way for Wedge to learn about his mission, but aside from that initial hiccup every other part of the flight plan had proceeded smoothly.
Maybe too smoothly. Which was the problem. Wedge was hopelessly bored. He glanced below, to the Strait of Hormuz, that militarized sliver of turquoise that separated the Arabian Peninsula from Persia. He checked his watch, a Breitling chronometer with built-in compass and altimeter his father had worn during strafing runs over Marjah twenty-five years before. He trusted the watch more than his onboard computer. Both said that he was forty-three seconds out from a six-degree eastward course adjustment that would take him into Iranian airspace. At which point—so long as the little humming box behind his head did its job—he would vanish completely.
It would be a neat trick.
It almost seemed like a prank that he’d been entrusted with such a high-tech mission. His buddies in the squadron had always joked that he should’ve been born in an earlier time. That’s how he’d gotten his call sign, “Wedge”: the world’s first and simplest tool.
Time for his six-degree turn.
He switched off the autopilot. He knew there’d be hell to pay for flying throttle and stick, but he’d deal with that when he got back to the Bush.
He wanted to feel it.
If only for a second. And if only for once in his life.
It would be worth the ass-chewing. And so, with a bunch of noise behind his head, he banked into Iranian airspace.
* * *
14:58 March 12, 2034 (GMT+8)
South China Sea
“You wanted to see me, Commodore?”
Commander Jane Morris, captain of the John Paul Jones, seemed tired, too tired to apologize for being almost fifteen minutes late to her meeting with Hunt, who understood the strain Morris was under. Hunt understood that strain because she herself had felt it on occasions too countless to number. It was the strain of getting a ship underway. The absolute accountability for nearly four hundred sailors. And the lack of sleep as the captain was summoned again and again to the bridge as the ship maneuvered through the seemingly endless fishing fleets in the South China Sea. The argument could be made that Hunt was under that strain three times over, based on the scope of her command, but both Hunt and Morris knew that the command of a flotilla was command by delegation while the command of a ship was pure command. In the end, you and you alone are responsible for everything your ship does or fails to do. A simple lesson they’d both been taught as midshipmen at Annapolis.
Hunt fished out two cigars from her cargo pocket.
“And what’re those?” asked Morris.
“An apology,” said Hunt. “They’re Cubans. My dad used to buy them from the Marines at Gitmo. It’s not as much fun now that they’re legal, but still . . . they’re pretty good.” Morris was a devout Christian, quietly evangelical, and Hunt hadn’t been sure whether or not she’d partake, so she was pleased when Morris took the cigar and came up alongside her on the bridge wing for a light.
“An apology?” asked Morris. “What for?” She dipped the tip of the cigar into the flame made by Hunt’s Zippo, which was engraved with one of those cigar-chomping, submachine gun–toting bullfrogs commonly tattooed onto the chests and shoulders of Navy SEALs or, in the case of Hunt’s father, etched onto the lighter he’d passed down to his only child.