The thing that struck Frank Shirer immediately about Peshawar was the smell of the northern Pakistani town — one of smoke, dust, dung, gasoline, and spices that he was unfamiliar with, which arose from the town’s bazaars, where one could wander down the Street of Partridge Lovers or the Street of the Storytellers, looking at the famed Persian carpets and watching the coppersmiths beating out their wares in the time-honored way. But if he thought he was in for any more sightseeing he was in for a shock, as within an hour of landing at Peshawar he was being familiarized with what had once been the Cinderella of the fighter production line: the Harrier vertical/short takeoff and landing close-support/reconnaissance fighter.
“Now, see ‘ere,” a British NCO said with me same kind of accent as that of the man called Doolittle who had managed to help Shirer fake his way through the eye chart exam at Dutch Harbor earlier in the war. “See we’ve placed two 30mm cannon — hundred rounds per gun — under the fuselage. Can carry up to eight thousand pounds of disposables if you like, but if you’re going up over the Hindu Kush, mate, it’s not bombs you’re gonna need, it’s height. So apart from the air-to-air missiles we’ll put on your underwing hard points, most of your weight’ll be extra gas and thirty-millimeter rounds. Okay?”
“Suits me,” Shirer said.
“Now, how many hours have you had in ‘em?” the NCO asked.
“None,” Shirer said.
The NCO looked at him aghast. “None? Blimey, mate, I ‘ope you’re a quick learner.”
“I can fly anything from a Tomcat to a B-52.”
“Yeah — maybe so, mate, but you got runways there, ‘aven’t you?”
“Well before the instructor gets here,” Shirer said, “why don’t you show me round the kitchen?”
“Crikey, you’re keen, I’ll say that about you.”
“Thanks.”
The NCO began with the ejector seat. “Martin-Baker Mark Nine — just in case. Right?”
“I like your sense of priorities, Sergeant.” The sergeant grinned, loosened up a bit. “There you’ve got your HUD— Smith’s — can’t get ‘em better than that, and a Smith’s air data computer. It comes to radar warning, we hand you over to old Marconi here, and if you get lucky you can lock on with the Ferranti laser range finder and target seeker. You’re strapped on top of a Rolls-Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust turbofan, maximum speed at low altitude plus or minus point nine, maybe Mach one if you fart.”
“I’ll remember.”
“This little baby’s big winner is the old Viff. Those two tits”—he meant the ferry tips or low-drag jet nozzles—”are little marvels, they are. Wivout them you might as well leave ‘er parked in the garage. That’s what you’ll be spending most of your time on — how to control those little buggers. Up, down, and around. Handled right can make a faster attacker look bloody stupid. Hopefully of course you won’t have anyone attacking you.”
“You mean there’s a good chance the mission might be off?” Shirer asked.
“Oh — I dunno about the politics of it, mate. But I mean the chows’d’ave to get their crackerjack fighters west in a big hurry in time to intercept any bombing raid, wouldn’t they?”
“I keep thinking they might have thought of that,” Shirer said sardonically.
“Only if they know about the mission, and with these dummy runs we’ve been making they probably don’t have a clue.”
The ground crew sergeant had no sooner finished talking than Squadron Leader J. Williams came out excitedly on the tarmac to exclaim, “It’s on! Just come through from London HQ. Turpan.”
“When, ma’am?” the sergeant asked.
“Four days time — five at the outside.”
Shirer was in shock. Squadron Leader Williams was a petite blonde.
“Christ!”
It was out before Shirer could stop himself.
“You’re Major Shirer, aren’t you?” she asked tersely, taking her mood from his.
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ve heard quite a lot about you. You and your nemesis, Marchenko. How many times did he shoot you down?”
Bloody hell, thought the sergeant, if he didn’t get in between them there’d be blood on the tarmac. “Squadron Leader Williams’ll be leading the Harrier cover.”
“I take it that doesn’t meet with your approval, Major?” she said tartly.
“What — er, no. I mean — fine. That’s fine.”
“I hope you’re a better flier than you are a liar.” She flashed an angry smile.
“I’ll try.”
“Good, because you’ve only got four days. Think you can handle it?”
“I’ll handle it.”
“We’ll see.”
Shirer knew rationally that there was no reason a woman shouldn’t be a combat pilot, no reason her reflexes shouldn’t be as quick as his, that she didn’t need a man’s physical strength to fly by wire, so what was his problem? He didn’t like it, that’s what.
“Ah, Major Shirer?” the sergeant tentatively said.
“Yes?”
“Ah, we don’t call the ferry tips ‘tits’ when the boss is around.”
“Anything else I ought to know?”
“Yes, sir. She’s a damn good pilot. Can turn this little gremlin on a dime. One more thing — she’s a stickler for discipline.”
“Sounds like fun.”
That night Frank sat down to write a quick note to Lana at Dutch Harbor. He had to be circumspect about what he said, and his letter was terse, not only because of what the squadron censors would take out or because he was fatigued from ten hours straight on the Harrier without yet having taken it up, but because he simply could not bring himself as a once-household name in America — an American ace, a Tomcat veteran — to tell Lana that his boss was female and younger than he. “My boss is English,” he said, and left it at that.
He knew he should be more broad-minded, more magnanimous, but damn it — he’d flown Tomcats, hooking the three-wire in zero visibility on a rolling deck, when she’d been going through puberty. No way he’d let on to Thompson, his replacement on the B-52, that he was under the direct command of a woman. Damn, now he knew why that toffee-nosed Fowler-Jones had talked him into it. They were so short of Harrier pilots they were having to use skirts. It was humiliating, that’s what it was. All right, so he was a male chauvinist pig, but hell — it just didn’t seem right. One thing for damn sure, he was going to learn every possible thing about the Harrier — this “little gremlin,” as the NCO had put it — that he could. He’d live on coffee alone in the next few days, if that’s what it took, and go over the gremlin inch by inch until he knew every part of it.
Why was it, he wondered, that men always called their ships and their aircraft “she”? He pushed it out of his mind and buried himself in the manual for the Ferranti 541 inertial navigation and attack system, the Smith Head Up Display much the same as he’d seen before.
Red-eyed and determined, Shirer mastered the vertical takeoff and landing over the next twenty-four hours and was ready for high-altitude tests. What was it she had said? “Your nemesis, Marchenko.”
Cheeky bitch! And whether it was her or some of the other pilots in the Harrier squadron, a rumor was going around that Marchenko was now stationed somewhere in eastern China as an adviser on the MiG-29s.